George Steiner, the celebrated French-US literary critic and essayist, has died at the age of 90, Britain's Cambridge University said on Tuesday. The university's Churchill College said it was "saddened" to his passing, which was first confirmed to the New York Times by his son David on Monday.

Steiner was an emeritus professor and founding fellow of the college, where his papers are held in the archives. "Our thoughts are with his wife, Zara, and his family," it added.

Francis George Steiner, who was born in Paris on April 23, 1929, came to Cambridge as a founding fellow of Churchill College from 1961 after obtaining a doctorate from Oxford and spending time at Princeton in the United States.

His academic career later took in an honorary fellowship at Oxford, and similar appointments at the Royal Academy of Arts, the British Academy and Stanford in California. From 1966 to 1997 he was senior book reviewer for the New Yorker magazine.

Steiner is survived by his wife, Cambridge historian Zara Steiner; and their two children, David, a US education adviser at Johns Hopkins, and Deborah, who heads the Classics department at Columbia University.