of the critic by having explored art and thought unbounded by national frontiers or academic disciplines. He advocated generalisation over specialisation, and insisted that the notion of being literate must encompass knowledge of both arts and sciences. Steiner believed that nationalism is too inherently violent to satisfy the moral prerogative of Judaism, having said "that because of what we are, there are things we can't do." Among Steiner's non-traditional views, in his autobiography titled Errata (1997), Steiner related his sympathetic stance towards the use of brothels since his college years at the University of Chicago. As Steiner stated, "My virginity offended Alfie (his college room-mate). He found it ostentatious and vaguely corrupt in a nineteen-year-old... He sniffed the fear in me with disdain. And marched me off to Cicero, Illinois, a town justly ill famed but, by virtue of its name, reassuring to me. There he organized, with casual authority, an initiation as thorough as it was gentle. It is this unlikely gentleness, the caring under circumstances so outwardly crass, that blesses me still." Central to Steiner's thinking, he stated, "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate." Steiner received criticism and support for his views that racism is inherent in everyone and that tolerance is only skin deep. He is reported to have said: "It's very easy to sit here, in this room, and say 'racism is horrible'. But ask me the same thing if a Jamaican family moved next door with six children and they play reggae and rock music all day. Or if an estate agent comes to my house and tells me that because a Jamaican family has moved next door the value of my property has fallen through the floor. Ask me then!" Works Steiner's literary career spanned half a century. He published original essays and books that address the anomalies of contemporary Western culture, issues of language and its "debasement" in the post-Holocaust age. His field was primarily comparative literature, and his work as a critic tended toward exploring cultural and philosophical issues, particularly dealing with translation and the nature of language and literature. Steiner's first published book was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (1960), which was a study of the different ideas and ideologies of the