ELITE IS NOT A CRITICISM:

He became a US citizen in 1944, going on to study at the Sorbonne, the University of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford, before working for the Economist as a leader writer. When he was sent to interview J Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he accepted a job there, spending two years at the university before taking on his role at Churchill College in Cambridge. He was also a prolific reviewer.

"He was an extraordinary figure. He was a critic in the Coleridge sense, not the Johnson sense. And he was a terrific performer," said McCrum. "I used to go to his lectures in Cambridge and they were sellouts, with applause at the end. We were all completely in his thrall. The performance was staggering."

In Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Steiner wrote: "Great works of art pass through us like storm winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers ... We seek to record their impact, to put our shaken house in its new order. Through some primary instinct of communion we seek to convey to others the quality and force of our experience. We would persuade them to lay themselves open to it. In this attempt at persuasion originate the truest insights criticism can afford."

Steiner was at times a controversial figure, drawing criticism for what some saw as elitism, others a lack of depth. As the critic Lee Siegel wrote for the New York Times in 2009, "his bracing virtue has been his ability to move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph," while "his irritating vice has been that he can move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph".

Steiner was criticised, in his own words, for being "a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done any more, when responsible knowledge is specialised knowledge".

As for charges of elitism, he brushed them away, telling the Guardian in 2001: "To be part of an elite means loving passionately and not negotiating your passions. If that's elitism, I plead guilty."

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