R B Le Page (1920-2006) was one of the founding fathers of sociolinguistics. From an impoverished and unpromising start in east London WW2, and after a dangerous few years flying against submarines during the war, he worked his way through Oxford to become a young lecturer at the new University College of the West Indies in the 1950s, then a professorship in Malaya, and finally at York University. It was in Jamaica that he developed a lifelong interest in multilingual communities and creole languages, developing an idea of language creation not as an abstract set of rules, but as what real people do in complex daily lives. This view conflicted with the prevailing Chomskyan idea of "deep rules" and idealised speakers, theories which Le Page regarded as inherently absurd. His ideas of language in society have been hugely influential.

This marvellously humane and witty autobiography describes the slow foment of his idea over four decades of work at twelve diffierent universities, leading to the creation (with Fred Cassidy) of the Dictionary of Jamaican English which is still a standard work, and the seminal study Acts of Identity (with A.Tabouret-Keller).