'Everything goes back to the Ottoman Empire, doesn't it? Sometimes I wonder: is it even dead?'

In her remarkable new book, Lea Ypi follows the concept of (in)dignity across empire’s collapse, nation-building, and the ties of family.

Lea Ypi recounts her grandmother’s life as a story of dignity, in the fate of a woman, in the bonds of a family, in the decline of an empire, and in the making of nations and states.

She weaves the story so that one of the most elusive philosophical concepts is pursued through her grandmother’s experiences and through literature. When she reimagines her grandmother’s life as a true Ottoman woman — in Salonica, at the end of empire, in the birth of Albania — Ypi, a philosopher and political theorist at the London School of Economics, probes ideas not in the abstract register of a seminar but through lived fragments of memory. There is bitterness, sadness, but also joy. The challenge gives her prose an uncommon energy.

I first met Lea when her debut book Free was published and she came to Oxford. We shared a panel. Since then I have heard her many times, read much of her work, and I must say: her dignified stance on equality, universality, and the ills of capitalism, her fearless defence…