George Steiner: Holocaust survivor and literary critic dies aged 90

Literary critic and essayist George Steiner has died in the UK, aged 90.

The French-US researcher died in Cambridge, where he had gone through 50 years as an Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College.

Destined to Austrian Jewish guardians in France in 1929, Francis George Steiner and his family fled to the US in 1940.

Portrayed by abstract pundit Maya Jaggi as "a multilingual and polymath", Steiner was a troublesome figure.

The full extent of his work - which included etymology, reasoning and abstract analysis - was applauded as much by his admirers as others disliked it.

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As one pundit wrote in The New York Times in 2009: "His supporting ideals has been his capacity to move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a solitary passage. His disturbing bad habit has been that he can move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a solitary passage."

'We come after.'

Steiner grew up communicating in French, German and English and later learned Italian.

He learned at the colleges of Harvard and Chicago before moving to the UK, where he worked at The Economist magazine for a long time during the 1950s.

As one of just two Jewish students at his school in France to endure the Holocaust, questions encompassing this dull time of European history pervaded quite a bit of his works.

"The dark riddle of what occurred in Europe is to be inseparable from my character," he wrote in a paper entitled "A Kind of Survivor".

Even though he was an incredible defender of expressions of the human experience, and expounded broadly on them, he noticed that they give no shield against the detestations of the Holocaust, writing in a book distributed in 1967: "We come after. We know since a man can understand Goethe or Rilke at night, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's worth of effort at Auschwitz toward the beginning of the day."

Steiner proceeded to hold visiting residencies at various colleges and got respects including France's Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. His productive compositions included both fiction and true to life, and he additionally routinely added to an assortment of art magazines.

He is made due by his better half, antiquarian and scholastic Zara Steiner, and their two youngsters.