Greater Manchester Police’s top officer [the late Michael Todd]…allowed himself to be blasted with a 50,000-volt Taser gun in a bid to get them issued to frontline police.

In the course of teaching a revision class on Kant, Donald [MacKinnon] came across a news item. The commanding officer of the French parachute regiments in Algeria had ordered his men to torture him, with the identical means and obscenities inflicted on their Algerian prisoners. Having undergone this exercise, General Massu announced that the pain was bearable, that the hideous reports published about torture were weak-kneed exaggerations. “We will now put Immanuel Kant aside”, said Donald as he entered the class. To him, this news-story embodied the fact of absolute, transcendent evil. It put in question not only Kant’s providentialism but the capacity of human reason to cope with the extremities of human conduct. To continue with an academic exegesis after reading such matter was inadmissable; or, rather, admissable solely if an authentic relation could be shown between the monstrous in Massu and Kant’s ethics.

George Steiner, Errata, p. 135