It is notoriously difficult to make a strong case for the enduring vitality of criticism written for a weekly or monthly magazine. [...] of course we find, among other things, a variety of local insights or judgments that may seem to us, and often are, ephemeral. [...]

But then all worthwhile insights are at bottom local, or are founded on close readings of texts, sentenes, loosely or tightly formulated ideas. [...] To speak of Steiner's observations in such a reading as "local" is to say in fact only that he was willing to do the essential work of the critic acutely responsive to a novel he took to have some genuine value.

the novelist's radical, "excoriating purpose"

"marmoreal purity"

"lapidary concision"

"with the tenebrous incense of the oracular"

Elias Canetti described the true writer as "the thrall of his time"