Lea Ypi is a professor at the London School of Economics, but she grew up in Albania, where, following the Second World War, a communist government achieved huge advances in industry, education, housing, health and sexual equality. Some citizens clung to religion, particularly Islam, but most of them acquiesced in the triumphalist atheism of the communist government. Many considered themselves lucky to be living in the most socialist of all possible socialist countries under the benevolent dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. But Hoxha died in 1985 and the People’s Republic of Albania collapsed six years later.

Ypi, who was born in 1979, witnessed the decline and fall of Albanian communism through the innocent eyes of a child and she reconstructed the experience in a compelling memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, which was published in 2021. She recalled, for example, the day when a teacher at her nursery school sat her charges down and told them, between sobs, that ‘Uncle Enver … has left us … for ever’, before reminding them that, through his work, he ‘continues to live’. Six-year-old Lea was perplexed, struggling to understand the meaning of life after death in a country where ‘religion was abolished’. She came home in tears. ‘Do we know any people who were Muslim in the olden days?’ she asked. To her father’s evident annoyance, her mother replied that, like many Albanians, ‘we are Muslim’. Indignantly, she told her parents that they ‘did not love Uncle Enver as much as I did’, which elicited an intriguing response from her enigmatic grandmother: ‘I’ll tell you a secret: I have met Uncle Enver. I met him many, many years ago when your grandfather and I were still young. The two of them were friends. How could I not love him if we have been friends?’

Ypi took a long time to realise that her family was not quite as ordinary as she had been led to believe. She did not question their insistence that they had no connection with Xhafer Ypi, the notorious quisling who briefly led fascist Albania some time before the accession of