Zygmunt Bauman was one of the great social thinkers of our time: inventor of the idea of liquid modernity, he transformed our way of thinking about the social conditions shaping our lives today. His own life was shaped by the great social forces that scarred the second half of the 20th century - war, communism, anti-Semitism, forced migration. His work bears the traces of an outsider who knew all-too-well the enormous impact that social and political forces can have on personal lives. Bauman never wrote a full biography, but he wrote extended letters to his daughters in which he recounted the details of his life -