George Steiner is one of the best-known literary critics in the English-speaking world today-perhaps because the term literary critic is a bit small for him. Like Susan Sontag, Steiner has followed a more public path. His essays are not hidden away in specialized academic journals. In periodicals for more general audiences, such as the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Encounter, and the Listener, they seek out (and perhaps help create) that elusive figure, the educated common reader. Certain of his obsessive themes and images-such as the cultivated Nazi torturer and the extra territoriality of the modern writer--have entered the public consciousness, and they now serve as a sort of Steiner trademark. His fiction, fixed intensely on the same motifs, has won prizes and has been adapted for television. To many who have no patience for the philosophy of Martin Heidegger or...