he lectured for another two years. He then became a founding fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 1961. Steiner was initially not well received at Cambridge by the English faculty. Some disapproved of this charismatic "firebrand with a foreign accent" and questioned the relevance of the Holocaust he constantly referred to in his lectures. Bryan Cheyette, professor of 20th-century literature at the University of Southampton said that at the time, "Britain [...] didn't think it had a relationship to the Holocaust; its mythology of the war was rooted in the Blitz, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain." While Steiner received a professorial salary, he was never made a full professor at Cambridge with the right to examine. He had the option of leaving for professorships in the United States, but Steiner's father objected, saying that Hitler, who said no one bearing their name would be left in Europe, would then have won. Steiner remained in England because "I'd do anything rather than face such contempt from my father." He was elected an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College in 1969. After several years as a freelance writer and occasional lecturer, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974; he held this post for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He lived by Goethe's maxim that "no monoglot truly knows his own language." He became Professor Emeritus in the University of Geneva upon his retirement in 1994 and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1995. He also held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature and Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002. Steiner was called "an intelligent and intellectual critic and essayist." He was active on undergraduate publications while at the University of Chicago and later became a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many journals and newspapers including The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. He wrote for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. While Steiner generally took things very seriously, he also revealed an unexpected deadpan humor: when he was once asked if he had ever read anything trivial as a child, he replied, Moby-Dick. Views Steiner was regarded as a polymath and is often credited with having recast the role