He was what many people call a human encyclopedia—not in the American sense, a blank vault of facts, but in the French Enlightenment one: a critical repository of significant knowledge. His long book reviews for this magazine, written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were dotted with allusions of the kind that a naturally horizontal thinker couldn’t help but include. But they were never imposed or forced—his mind truly, on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to take in the view at Heidegger. Steiner was a lifelong traveller of those routes. – The New Yorker