ABSTRACT
Zygmunt Bauman was forced to leave his native Poland in 1968. He was one of six professors who were purged from the University of Warsaw, offi cially because they were the ‘spiritual instigators’ of student unrest but unoffi cially – and more accurately – because they had become a thorn in the fl esh of the communist state. Five of the six, including Bauman, were Jewish, as propaganda made sure everyone knew (Tester 2004: 77-81). By this time Bauman had published 14 Polish-language books. A fi fteenth title was pulped by the authorities shortly before its planned publication. In 1971 Bauman was appointed to the Chair of Sociology at the University of Leeds in the UK, remaining there until his retirement in 1990. From his arrival in the UK to the time of this writing (late 2012) he published 40 or so more books, all but a couple of them fi rst written in English.
