Bob Le Page (1920-2006) was a founding father of British sociolinguistics - the science of language not as a theoretical abstraction but as people actually speak, write and understand it in their daily lives. This unusual academic autobiography charts the development of his hugely influential thinking. Growing up in east London in the 1920s, and after a perilous war in the Fleet Air Arm, he made his way through Oxford to a lecturing post in the new University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. There, the slow foment of his ideas began as he observed complex multilingual societies. After a professorship in Malaya, he was appointed to York University where he built one of the first language departments specialising in creole studies, with a research programme that convinced him that the prevailing Chomskyan fashions for ideal speakers and 'deep rules' were based on premises that were 'inherently absurd'. He could be pugnacious in his opinions, stating that, 'Most of the beliefs that most people have about language are demonstrably false.' But his thinking was founded on decades of study of multivarying communities, leading to the ground-breaking Dictionary of Jamaican English (1965) and the seminal study Acts of Identity (1985). This witty and provocative memoir shows Le Page as a deeply humane scholar, always concerned to pay attention to real lives, and to advance understanding of how we really talk. Originally issued in a private publication, IVORY TOWERS is now available to everyone interested in the scholarship of language, and also in the unremitting work of establishing and defending higher education around the world.