num_pages: 344
description: Between 1967 and 1997 George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker making new books difficult ideas and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to the common reader. He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism the Dutch Renaissance childrens games war-time Britain Hitlers bunker and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss Cellini Bernhard Chardin Mandelstam Kafka Cardinal Newman Verdi Gogol Borges Brecht Wittgenstein Chomsky and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising.
language: English
title: At the New Yorker
publisher: New Directions