The chapter demonstrates how the life experiences of a small number of individuals can illuminate an important dimension of British social structure. Its particular focus is an ever-present aspect of British society – class. The meaning and effects of class are seen through the prism of four people's experience of enforced redundancy or early retirement during the early 1990s. Two of our subjects belonged to what would normally be described as industrial working-class occupations – both were coal miners. One had worked on the coalface, the other was a craftsman engineer, engaged in maintenance work underground. Their stories show that apparently small differences of position within a social class are associated with substantial differences of experience and outlook, differences we believe are representative. Our two other subjects were middle class. One of them had been educated at ‘Oxbridge’, and had worked in an overseas service of the British government. His experience reveals that anxieties about class and status can loom as large for the relatively privileged as for mineworkers. The lives of the first three of these subjects had all been shaped by strong ‘class cultures’, and even in personal crises the influence of these cultures remained strong. Our fourth subject was a woman who had been a personnel manager. Her experience was like that of our other three subjects: it showed the pervasive pressures of the ‘marketising’ reforms of Thatcherism throughout British working life in this period. She might well have been an agent of those pressures on account of her job; she seems also to have been a victim of them. It seems that no occupation escaped the reach of these ideological forces. In this woman's case study, we can glimpse gender as an additional source of vulnerability. We can also note her lesser preoccupation with the values and cultures of class. We also found this smaller salience of class in the experience of subjects from ethnic minorities (for example, Djamilah and Steven in Chapter Thirteen of this volume), suggesting that consciousness of class may have a less significant role in some emergent groups in British society than it did for those formed in the pre-Thatcherite period. What is remarkable about these narratives is how much is revealed about a larger social process and its history by considering and comparing just four individuals’ experiences.