Born on 6 November 1928 in
Manhattan, New York City, Zara Alice Shakow was the daughter of Frances (née Price) and Joseph Shakow. 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==