Dazzle was, of course, the very essence of the Steiner sound. The magisterial tone, the cosmopolitan content, the very assumption that the reader was as intimately familiar with the history of European literature and philosophy as he was: it all went to form the “aura” of his criticism. Names were dropped like confetti, sprinkled from such a height that at times they inevitably missed their target. But he was interested in big pictures, not small incisions. – Times Literary Supplement