Language and Silence is George Steiner's collection of those articles he published between 1958 and 1966. It deals with a great many cultural events and preoccupations in that period and as such is interesting and useful. Some of the essays have real merits. One need not see Thomas Mann's Felix Krull in quite the same way as Dr Steiner to recognise its good qualities. Generally Steiner exposes much European cultural history that is normally unstudied, and exhibits, in his literary commentaries, culture and erudition.

But it would be a derogation of Steiner's overall aim in this collection merely to comment lightly on a few individually excellent essays. Such wider intentions Steiner expresses in his preface:

Primarily this is a book about language: about language and politics, language and the future of literature, about the pressures on language of totalitarian lies and cultural decay, about language and other codes of meaning...