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“... feature of the Liberian civil war, which lasted from December 1989 until the election of Charles Taylor as President in July 1997: Some people assert that fighters were encouraged to carry out such practices by their ritual specialists, while others may have simply improvised behaviour on the basis of a received belief that this would make them ...”

“... points out, by communitarians and others on both sides of the Atlantic, notably Amitai Etzioni, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Utilitarianism is not enough. If solidarity is to be a real presence in our lives rather than a hollow slogan, then there must be some shared focus of – I can’t think of a better word than reverence. Speeches by ...”

“... Government the State Department reports is guilty of a routine use of torture), and Liberia’s Charles Taylor – an adept in the use of child soldiers and the lopping off of hands, legs, ears and lips. But – and this is where I part company from Melvern – the reason toxic outsiders can so easily play ducks and drakes with African lives is to do ...”

“... for the sake of a bypass. Some miles outside Barnstaple down a very muddy lane live my friends Charles and Pamela Gott. Charles and I have been friends for almost sixty years. Indeed, he is almost my only surviving Oxford friend, as distinct from acquaintance. Our mutual affection has remained un-dimmed since the time ...”

“... for the British aristocracy’. 1882 is even less fertile. All I can discover is that in 1882 Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, administered the oath to himself in the House of Commons. But try the half-centuries and relief is at hand. On 4 June 1832 the great Reform Bill became law under the name of the Representation of the People Act – quite a ...”

“... patented by Hesketh Pearson and, I think, Hugh Kingsmill). Shrewsbury School reminds me that Charles Darwin has again become a centre of controversy. The argument is far above my head and in any case does not stir my passion. On reflection, it seems to me unlikely that an entire system of animal development could be worked out after a single voyage on ...”

“... rather obscured by glossing political action merely as the gauging of efficient means to ends. As Charles Taylor (the Canadian politician and philosopher, not the Liberian gunslinger) has pointed out, dousing the Vietnamese population in Agent Orange is only prima facie comprehensible as the upshot of a cost/benefit util-tot. It is better seen ...”

“... from Dewey and Heidegger to Arendt and Marcuse to Habermas, Gadamer, Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Bernstein is a good reader, a master of what, with deference to Hegel, he calls ‘immanent critique’: the effort to determine the internal structure and coherence of an author’s views, to determine what to preserve and what to discard ...”

“... delighting in imaginary ‘sport’ with bevies of accommodating lovelies, including Mrs Steward, Charles II’s inamorata, and the queen (even in fantasy, Pepys was a staunch royalist). ‘The best that was ever dreamed,’ he chortled over a night-time’s romp with the delectable Lady Castlemaine, another of Charles’s ...”

“... of the king and queen. At that point, it was not only the radicals who were still exclaiming with Charles James Fox that the Revolution was the greatest and the best event that ever happened to the world. Pitt himself had declared a few months earlier that ‘the present convulsions of France must, sooner or later, terminate in general harmony … thus ...”

“... that gave monarchists another count for the bill of indictment. In The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649), Cromwell was goaded to ever greater wickedness by the New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peter, his sidekick ‘i’the Machiavilian world’: the future Lord Protector’s outsize red toper’s nose, a staple of royalist humour, eventually takes on ...”

“... different treatments, the majority of which were tried on Alice, but most shared the view of Charles Taylor, Alice’s first doctor in New York, that the body should be stimulated and the mind soothed. From this it was only a short step to saying, as several neurologists did, that too much education was a bad thing for a woman. ‘For patience, for ...”

“... rebels. Fid. Def. survives on the coinage, though threatened with pluralisation of faiths under Charles III. But Ind. Imp. vanished seventy years ago, a fading embarrassment even then, to be explained away as a typical piece of Disraeli’s showmanship. Historians have shied away from closer examination of Queen Victoria’s role as empress, but the subject ...”

“... in her day-to-day life, the tension remained palpable many years afterwards. According to Charles Bradlaugh’s daughter, Hypatia, ‘she was the most tactless person I ever knew.’ But even for those who disliked her methods, denied her inspiration and opposed her opinions, there was something about her which compelled admiration. To Nehru, who had ...”

“... Rather​ D.J. Taylor than me, when it comes to untangling the unbelievably complicated and messy love lives of the so-called Horizon circle: the people who clustered adoringly around Cyril Connolly during his years as editor of the short-lived literary magazine (1939-50). Was Connolly still carrying on his affair with Diana Witherby when he started his affair with Lys (while still married to Jean and while Lys was still married to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that relationship last?Taylor wades deep into the cigaretty fug of that small literary circle awash with till-boredom-do-us-part love affairs conducted in rented accommodation ...”