How words shape our world

There is gold in these pages but the reader has to work hard to mine it and cast it into something useful. Taylor deserves his reputation as a thinker of unparalleled breadth and depth, but in this book his vision has turned too inward and backward. It is as though he has become too transfixed by his insight that we are the products of our cultures and history and so has become trapped in his own.

Review of Charles Taylor’s The Language Animal in Prospect (April 2016)