Zara Alice Steiner, FBA (née Shakow; 6 November 1928 – 13 February 2020)[1][2] was an American-born British historian and academic.
[3][4] 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.
[2] Shakow was a 1948 graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and gained bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Oxford in 1950 (in two years, rather than three)[4] and 1954 respectively.
[5] 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.
[4] From 1968 to 1995, Steiner was a Fellow of New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) of Cambridge University.