Lea Ypi is chatting to me from Delhi, where it’s 10 at night and she’s just opened a beer: but neither the lateness of the hour nor the heat - not to mention the exhaustion of a month combining a family holiday with teaching and lecturing commitments - diminish her ability to conduct an extraordinarily complex and wide-ranging conversation.

Over the course of an hour, we discuss her new book, Indignity, the successor to the award-winning Free, which detailed her life both before and after the fall of communism in Albania in 1990; dissect the concept of dignity and moral agency, with reference to philosophers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche; ponder whether truth is more readily found in the panoramic 19th-century novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky than in non-fiction; and address ourselves to the great story of political exclusion that began with the first World War and the Treaty of Versailles.

Indignity encompasses all these areas and more besides, but first and foremost it is the story of Ypi’s grandmother, Leman, who was born in Salonica - present-day Thessaloniki - in 1918, but emigrated alone to Tirana, the capital of Albania, when she was just 18, spurred by a desire for independence, an ambition to study economics and grief at the death of her beloved aunt Selma. Leman was a constant presence in her granddaughter’s life, Ypi remembers: “I am who I am in part because of who she was and what she taught me. Really, she brought me up, and a lot of her experiences had been transmitted to me, but in this very pedagogical way, whereby she always told the stories for