This book crosses different literary zones and has a foot in different disciplinary camps. For instance, it’s neither and both biography and autobiography, neither and both a social history and a history of ideas. Some readers may be disappointed, expecting a more prosaic journey, while others (I hope) will appreciate the book’s refusal to fit stereotyped notions of what books ought to be.

One starting point for Father and daughter is the familiar notion that the past becomes more important as we age, not only because there’s more of it, but because its call for meaning becomes ever more insistent. We feel an intemperate need to assemble life stories that explain who we are and how we got here. No straightforward exercise, this task involves memory, experience, data, interpretation, evidence, context, systematic and non-systematic analysis – in short, all those tools social scientists use to ply their trade. The central task of Father and daughter is to draw on these methods in order to investigate two intellectual and social biographies: my own and my father, Richard Titmuss’s. I try to show in the book how these biographies are connected and also disconnected, how who he was and what he did intersects with the trajectory of my own work and identity. This story is intensely context-dependent, so there’s much in Father and daughter about the development of 20th-century social science, that disciplinary universe in which a good part of both our lives have been spent. There’s even in it the outline of an alternative history of social science, one in which women’s achievements surface from their subterranean rumblings to form a visible part of the historical landscape. The women’s story is part of a wider one about how the ‘socials’ of the 20th century – social work, social policy, sociology, social reform – have variously confronted, competed and coalesced with one another.

Father and daughter is a personal and public story – it’s that, perhaps, above all. There are two provisos. The first is that I’ve chosen not to say much about my own contemporary relationships with men, women, (adult) children and grandchildren. These aren’t part of this particular story.