I was born in 1949 in Czechoslovakia which I left in 1971 refusing to 'live' under Stalinism.  I studied Psychology at Birkbeck College and UCL in London, then lived and worked in St Andrews, Edinburgh and Manchester.  I taught psychology for 27 years at Manchester University and was also heavily involved in the trade union AUT. I left the University in January 2011 as an emeritus professor of historical psychology to focus on scholarship and to try my hand more intensely at visual arts.  I continue academic work, researching possibilities for analytical historical psychology and developing a framework for psychology that takes seriously the idea that people are part of the world rather than its masters. The two ideas I focus on are 'people as practical historians' and world as a structured immediacy'.