Norman Dennis Writer
Norman Dennis (16 August 1929 – 13 November 2010) was a British sociologist.Born one of four sons to a tram driver, Dennis was educated at Bede Collegiate Boy's School and was offered a place at Corpus Christi, Oxford, but declined it in favour of London School of Economics, where he achieved a first in economics. He held posts at Leeds, Bristol and Birmingham before finally holding a long-term post at Newcastle. He was there for 35 years.He was a lifelong Labour supporter and was a Labour councillor in Millfield in Sunderland in the early 1970s. He was driven to do this by his disgust at the planned slum clearances in Sunderland at the time, which he opposed strongly. It was this that also inspired him to write about economic pressures and how they shape society.His critique of the Macpherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence was controversial but commanded wide respect.Melanie Phillips wrote in the Sunday Times that, by the time Dennis and his co-authors had finished, "not much of Macpherson is left standing".In 2011, Peter Hitchens described Dennis as "one of the most articulate and ferocious defenders of morals and justice in recent times". 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".Dennis died of leukaemia on 13 November 2010 in Sunderland, at 81.
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