This engaging four-part memoir by an eminent historian of late antiquity and the Byzantine world has much to recommend it to a diverse readership. Part One (Chapters 1–4) opens with a rich and thought-provoking account of working-class life, industry, and poverty at Leek in Staffordshire during the 1940s and 1950s, the setting for the author’s childhood amid an extended family, relations between the members of which were sometimes a mystery to the growing child, and in part remain opaque to the mature writer. Chapter 1 (the first in twenty-eight of very varied length), offers readers amongst much else a fascinating glimpse of the different ways in which working-class men and women did, and did not, practice some form of Protestant Christianity: Prof. Cameron’s father had rung the bells at St Edward’s, Cheddleton, as a boy with his five brothers, yet the family didn’t attend services. Nor did her parents go to church except for her father at Christmas; yet, they, her aunt Mabel, and Uncle Jack ‘all had Bibles and prayer books from their youth’ and sent the young Averil to Sunday school (p. 32). She would later marry in the same church where she was baptised as an infant and confirmed at sixteen. Huge numbers from the town’s local churches and chapels took part in the annual ‘Walking Round’ each July, processing with banners ‘followed by hymn-singing in the marketplace and tea and sports’ (p. 33). Of more importance to the unfolding memoir, though, is how deeply the values, attitudes, and mores of the social world shaped the ideas, interests, expectations, questions, and confidence of the author as she progressed on her ‘unlikely path’ in life (p. 11) to become first a Somerville College undergraduate reading ‘Greats’, but also to become a young wife and mother, a University lecturer and professor in London, and eventually the Head of an Oxford college.

Part Two (Chapters 5–15) largely concerns Prof. Cameron’s academic career over more than forty years as it has both been influenced by and contributed to the developing disciplines of late antique and Byzantine studies. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who wishes to understand the changing nature of Classics and Ancient History in the second half of the twentieth century. It contains, for example, a considered appreciation of Averil’s doctoral supervisor, Arnaldo Momigliano, his strengths and limitations set in this larger picture. Many academic friendships are recorded with gratitude, and also some of the academic quarrels which harmed them. Part Two should also be read by historians of the changing place of women in that half century. The memoir details and charts not least the multiple difficulties faced by a female academic in institutions and at events where (often elderly) men long predominated and still do, and the stigma attached to being a single mother when her marriage broke up. In 1970, Averil was the only woman at the Byzantine Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks ‘and the youngest speaker by several decades’ (p. 72). The lively details are often telling of the wider culture, such as a Latin professor who spent his lunchtimes drinking gin and playing poker (p. 85). The narrative demonstrates and validates its author’s interest in ‘the question of how ideas and assumptions were formulated and how they worked as active agents in history’ (p. 102). She shows how a historian’s own life-story and circumstances impact on her research and historical writings.

Part Three (Chapters 16–23) sets out Prof. Cameron’s experiences as Warden of Keble College, Oxford, and her senior roles in the wider university. This should be compulsory reading for the (admittedly fewer) people interested in obtaining such posts, alerting them to the hazards of a job where much is expected, not least in fundraising, but where the power to achieve anything is strictly circumscribed. It should also be read by historians of the modern Church of England for its account of how women’s ordination impacted on the college chapel and wider community. The author describes the different ways in which she sought to heal divisions within the college fellowship, to support the life of the chapel, and to address structural issues facing Keble, in an account that seeks to do justice to the complex interplay of the personalities involved. Part Four (Chapters 24–28) then relates something of Prof. Cameron’s (semi-)retirement, as well as some earlier travels, and honestly notes her regrets – the failure of the marriage, and not having written the book she had hoped to write on Orthodoxy.

Prof. Cameron concludes her memoir by how noting ‘how the long term effects of my childhood and the huge transition I made have held me back more and for longer in terms of confidence than I would have admitted until now’ (p. 294). The comment may be taken alongside her earlier brief account of staying at Newnham College, Cambridge, as the guest of its Principal, Prof. Onora O’Neill. The latter’s ‘seriousness’ made her feel ‘frivolous’ (p. 208)! It’s a self-image that sits oddly beside the five or so pages in the memoir’s bibliography that list Averil’s academic publications, the assured Head of House whose portrait by Mark Roscoe is reproduced as Figure 8, her achievements as a teacher and doctoral supervisor (whose help the current reviewer gratefully acknowledges), and her raising of two children as a working mother. The memoir reveals little of what that achievement cost, but the reviewer is left wondering not so much how the author’s childhood held her back, but how it gave her the determination and courage to achieve so much.