 I'm a professor emeritus of McGill University, where I worked from 1961 until I retired in 1992. However, I have not been doing nothing since that time. I continue contact with the University of the West Indies, where I frequently visit. And I have also in the last number of years been concerned with the literary legacy of my father Carl Polanyi, which I have donated to Concordia University in Montreal, but I have maintained the rights of publication and I have been concerned with all many translations and many requests relating to my father's work. I was born in Vienna in 1923. It was incidentally a year of the Great Inflation. My grandmother told me that the year I was born, they would take money in carts to the grocery and they would just weigh the amount of it, they didn't count anything anymore in the inflation year. I grew up as a child, I had a very happy childhood. We lived in the second district in Vienna in a beautiful home, looking out at the Reserve Begarten, that is the nursery for the whole of the city of Vienna, so it was green everywhere. And I had a very happy childhood. And I am told that I really introduced my parents to some of the features of Socialist Vienna and of the kind of cultural organizations, in this case, having to do with children, children's camps and facilities in the area where I would go up to school to do all sorts of handicrafts and things like this. My parents both came to admire very much those Socialist administrations, generally referred to as Red Vienna, best known for the remarkable social housing. And you see, yes it did, it was very important to the rest of my life, particularly the last days of Red Vienna and in the short Civil War, which finished it in 1934, of which I remember very vividly, because my mother put me in charge of the house, in charge of the grandmother, in charge of everything, gave me, for the first time, some paper money to go, and I went downstairs and bought a lot of potatoes and bread, and it felt very important indeed, for about three days the electricity was off, there was a general strike affecting the electricity, and when it came back on on the Thursday of the week that had started on Monday, my grandmother was immensely pleased, but I knew that was bad news, our side had lost, and it was in effect the defeat, the defeat of the trade unions and the Socialist administration of Vienna when I returned to school the following Monday, and found that many teachers were missing, I was told they had been arrested, including the head of the school, and this made a very deep impression on me, I kind of think. I like to say it was a formative event of my life, because I knew which side I was on. I was sent to England in 1934, my father was already in England, he, as you may know, was employed by an important economic financial weekly known as the Earth Flasher-Folkswetter, was the Austrian economist, and he had been informed by his colleagues that his best option might be to go to England where he had many good contacts, the paper was in financial difficulties, all having to do with the accession of Hitler to office in Germany, and my mother stayed for two more years in Vienna because she was working for the militia of the Austrian Social Democratic Party called the Schutzbund, and they then were illegal, and I was sent to England, I stayed with good family friends that we have known since Vienna days, I was sad to leave, very sad to leave, and I must say my first encounters with England were not favorable, I thought it was a horrible place. It's a lot of chimney pots, as the train came through the suburbs of South London, and all you could see is chimney pots and nothing green, and oh my god, what an awful place, but I got to like it later. I was very fortunate in England to receive a free place in a avant-garde prestigious co-educational boarding school, that was one of the very few, name of B-Dale, it's well known in Britain, and I did receive a first-class education. My ambition was to study physics, that's what I wanted to do, and I managed, I got accepted to Cambridge to the science physics tripods, but there was no scholarship, so that didn't work out. I think I tried the same thing again, my other favorite subject was history, and I tried in Oxford, and I got accepted, but again no scholarship. I decided I was a total academic failure, and I would just settle for London School of Economics, and that is how, economics was never my first choice, so I went to LSE, it was during the war now, 1941, the school was evacuated to Cambridge, so we had the benefit of being able to attend Cambridge lectures, as well as our own. There came a time when I was called up for national service, of course I wanted like all the rest of the girls that were there to work for one of the rents, the Navy, or the Air Force, or the Army units for women, but that was all closed, so I, this said, well get to find yourself a job and that'll be your national service, and I found myself positioned in labor research for the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the largest union at that time in the country, basically doing, making more material, and then I finished at LSE after the war.