George Steiner is one of the most stimulating, wide-ranging - often maddening - critics at work today. He displays an almost messianic zeal in the promotion and defence of literature, and a critical passion that is rare in these jaded, post-humanist times - his "real presence" is one that we should be profoundly grateful for."during the time when the arts of reading and the status of a text have come under pressure". This pressure he sees as twofold: on the one hand there is the postwar critical onslaught by the various "isms" on the very notions intelligibility, authorial volition, identity; on the other, the dizzyingly rapid advances in information technology, which put in question the survival as a popular artifact of the traditional printed and bound book. Steiner has always seen the two poles of Western culture as located at Athens and Jerusalem, and these pieces show his profound concern for the retention of classical forms and ideals, and voice again and again his insistence on the centrality of Jewish experience, of Hebraic "textuality", to the thought of our time. For newcomers to Steiner's work, this collection is an ideal place to begin; for old hands, it is a welcome reminder of the breadth and variety of Steiner's interests and obsessions.