Robert Boyers joins us again. He is founder and editor of the journal Salma Gundy and faculty

member at Skidmore College. He's author of, among many other things, the tyranny of virtue,

identity, the academy, and the hunt for political heresies. His new book is Maestroes and Monsters,

Days and Nights with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. That's our topic today. Welcome, editor and

Professor Boyers. Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

All right. First, the introductory question. Just tell us, tell our listeners, just just refresh them.

Our younger ones may not be fully familiar with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. A quick capsule of

each one. Okay. I mean, it's one of those things where you just sort of know that 25 or 30 years earlier, you wouldn't need to do that.

Everyone would know both of those figures.

Well, I guess it's fair to say that they were both of them, two of the most influential,

widely read, widely debated writers, thinkers, critics in the world.

Zontag was, I would say, the quintessential celebrity intellectual for about 30 or 40 years.

It's not surprising that when Woody Allen wanted to sort of exemplify the category

intellectual, he would invoke the name Susan Zontag in his movies.

Steiner was more scholarly than Zontak. He was often referred to as the polymaths. He wrote

more than 20 books. He was the book critic of the New Yorker magazine for 30 years. He had an

enormous following in this country and elsewhere in Europe most especially he was

a frequent talking head on European television shows he was fluent in syncs languages he could

speak on television in Italy Germany France Spain and on. And so they were both extraordinary people,

and they really, in many ways, instigated

the conversation that literate people were having

about all sorts of things for about a half a century.

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