Born one of four sons to a tram driver, Norman Dennis was educated at Bede Collegiate Boys' School.
He was offered a place at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but declined it in favour of the London School of Economics, where he achieved a first-class honours degree in economics.
[1] Dennis held academic posts at the Universities of Leeds, Bristol and Birmingham before finally holding a long-term post as Lecturer, later Reader, in Social Studies at Newcastle University, where he worked for 35 years.
He was driven to do this by his disgust at the planned slum clearances in Sunderland at the time, which he opposed strongly.
[2] The Daily Telegraph news blogger Ed West described Dennis as "a key analyst of late 20th-century British society whose influence, I suspect, will stretch long into the 21st".