Zara Steiner

Zara Alice Steiner, ( Shakow; 6 November 1928 – 13 February 2020) She was of Lithuanian-Jewish descent through her father, who was an outfitter who provided equipment to polar explorers, and her mother was a homemaker. Richard J. Evans described her two volumes in the Oxford History of Modern Europe (The Lights That Failed and The Triumph of the Dark) as "standard works" on international diplomacy between both world wars. In 2007, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the UK's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.

She married the literary critic and scholar George Steiner in 1955. The couple were introduced by their respective Harvard professors who knew both of them. Their daughter, Deborah Steiner, is a Professor of Classics at Columbia University. George Steiner died on 3 February 2020, and Zara Steiner died from pneumonia at their Cambridge home ten days later, aged 91.

Selected works