“To Sir, With Love” is E.R. Braithwaite’s incredibly moving memoir of his time as a teacher in the tough East End of London, a few years after the end of the Second World War. Braithwaite was a former Royal Air Force, with an engineering degree. He was also a black man in a city and a country still living in the afterglow of its imperial years, full of casual racial prejudice. This story details his first year as a teacher, struggling to reach out to a classroom of tough teenagers.