George Steiner’s keynote lecture on music at the 2010 Nexus Conference ‘What’s Next for the West? Superman meets Beethoven’, on 11 June in Amsterdam. nexus-instituu...
I remember reading 'Tolstoy OR Dostoevsky' 40-odd years ago and profiting from it: a kind of astrology of two types of readers. I don't remember that he took sides, unlike Nabokov (who favored Tolstoy). I didn't realize that this was his first book. I remember being kind of amazed that he would write a book about Fischer-Spassky 1972, 'Fields of Force'. The indices of his books were always reading lists of the Great Books. No wonder he had so few people to talk to. Like Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss, when someone like Steiner dies, a final light in the world goes out.
@@johnmulligan455 Just mind about your own understanding or lack of it. Steiner was a great critic and reader, indeed, but not a great creator or an artist of any depth.
