How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been manipulated to circumvent the truth at high levels or charged with vulgarity and imprecision by mass-consumer culture? How can fractured language adapt to the demands of more exact speech required by mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions addressed in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.

Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the editorial staff ofThe Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wroteTolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and beganThe Death of Tragedy (1961). In 1964 he publishedAnno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War.Language and Silence was published in 1967. His other work includesProofs and Three Parables, which Faber published in 1992.George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.