Book excerpt: "George Steiner at The New Yorker collects fifty-three of his fascinating and wide-ranging essays from the more than one hundred and thirty he has contributed to the magazine. Steiner possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children's games, wartime Britain, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Bernhard, Kafka, Beckett, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide, from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of Borges. Again and again in his New Yorker essays everything Steiner looks at is made to bristle with possibility, with the genuine prospect of becoming fresh and thrilling." --Book Jacket.