George Steiner, essayist whose family fled France to escape the Nazis, dies at 90

Mr Steiner, who was one of only two children from his school in France who was not murdered in the Shoah, was born in 1929 in Paris to Austrian Jewish parents who had moved out of Vienna to escape rising antisemitism.

They escaped France a month before the Nazis occupied Paris.

"The black mystery of what happened in Europe is to me indivisible from my own identity," he would later write in an essay entitled A Kind of Survivor.

He also wrote in 1967: "We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning."

Growing up, his parents insisted he learn languages and he grew up speaking English, French and German. He was educated at the University of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford.

He published more than 40 books between 1952 and 2011 on subjects from Homer to Heidegger.

The JC's literary editor Gerald Jacobs recalled attending Steiner's lectures as a Cambridge undergraduate, saying they were "undoubtedly the most inspiring" although he could "shade into provocation" and his "sense of drama" led to "indiscriminate, sweeping statements".

"George Steiner has himself become a dauntingly intellectual presence, bringing to his teaching and writing, about literature well beyond the English brand that I studied, a depth of scholarship and breadth of reference to which few could aspire," Mr Jacobs wrote in 2017.

Steiner died in Cambridge - where he had been an Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College since 1969 - on Monday.