This article presents a review of Dennis Marsden's work. Looking at his oeuvre overall it is the family and intimate social relations and social class that are at the centre of his interests and analytical focus. Part of the power and effectiveness of his work was an ability to see families and their everyday lives in relation to social policy and to relate policies and their effects back to the intimate everyday lives of families. "Education and the Working Class" is about class mobility, class inequality and waste, and about what Marsden describes as a "blockage"--selective education. In stark contrast to the sometimes pathologising focus on working-class failure in much of the contemporary sociology of education, "Education and the Working Class" works with a sample of 90 "successfully" working-class children. That is, children who passed the 11+ and went to grammar school and many of whom went on to higher education. "Mothers Alone: Poverty and the Fatherless Family" is about single mothers and fatherless families living on "national assistance". The book presents the "elements of grief and loss in these mothers' descriptions of their lives". They are women who are often lonely and social isolated but also struggling to maintain a decent standard of life for their children. "The State of Affairs: Explorations in Infidelity and Commitment" is an edited collection, part of a series on personal relationships, and contains two papers--""From Here to epiphany": Power and Identity in the Narrative of an Affair", and "Affairs and Children". In many respects this is very different from Marsden's earlier research but it nonetheless addresses and extends some key themes, particularly and obviously the focus on the family and family life, and emotions and intimate social relationships. In many ways Marsden's work anticipated many of the research sensibilities that were re-discovered through the move to "reflexivity" in the 1980s and 1990s. He also anticipated aspects of the feminist critiques of social policy that were developed in the same period. His focus on "class discomforts" and exclusion and alienation at school and university anticipated a whole tranche of work done in the past 15 years that deploys Bourdieu to explore the work of different capitals and habituses in the education field, both at school and in higher education. The focus on the social and family lives of women also anticipates the subsequent burgeoning of studies of classed mothering. Throughout the books also, there is a sense of the intimacy, emotionality, diversity and complexity of family life. (Contains 5 notes.)