In this remarkable short book, the foremost intellectual of our age brings a lifetime of erudition to bear on a subject that he has grappled with for decades, and whose future is profoundly uncertain.
The Idea of Europe finds George Steiner reckoning with Europe from a number of different angles. "Europe," he writes, "is the place where Goethe's garden almost borders on Buchenwald, where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death." It is, in other words, a continent rich with contradiction, whose many tensions―cultural, social, political, economic, and religious―have for centuries conspired to pull it apart, even as it has become more and more unified.
