old age
The art of laziness
New York Living a life of pleasure is fun, but it can also become tiresome. Living an ethical life of…
Lumpily scripted and poorly plotted: Cry Macho reviewed
Clint Eastwood is 91; Cry Macho may well be his last film. Or maybe not. He has, after all, been…
Anthony Hopkins's portrayal of dementia will undo you: The Father reviewed
The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in…
Why Mick Jagger is an insult to rock
New York Orthodox Easter Sunday came late in May this year, and I spent it at an old friend’s Fifth…
Horrible – but in a very fun way: I Care a Lot reviewed
I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s…
Battle for the boomers
This year’s presidential election may see a new pattern that may prove disastrous for the GOP. Former vice president Joe…
How to have a happy old age
Gstaad Birthdays at my age are for the birds, but always a good excuse for a party. Messages of…
Jan Morris, at 93, meditates on what it means to be old
‘I’m getting rather tired of me,’ begins Jan Morris in one of the diary entries in Thinking Again, almost certainly…
Whisky and striptease: stories from an old people’s home
For the last four years of her long life, this upstairs room and this magnificent sea view belonged to Mrs…
My soulmate Brian Sewell
Romy Somerset is the sweetest, nicest young girl in London. She’s also my goddaughter and I remember, during her christening…
The extraordinary life of 104-year-old dancer Eileen Kramer
It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year-old on the radio. You’re even less likely to hear one…
My life as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer for my mother
My fifth week confined to barracks as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer. I drive to the supermarket about twice…
The strange people who keep a nightly vigil over my mother
To begin with it was mice. The house was overrun with them. She saw them out of the corner of…
It is a sin to die in the Land of the Depraved
New York Remember when the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era…
Nine angst-ridden men
‘Insufficiency’ is a favourite David Szalay word. The narrator of his previous novel, Spring, suffered from ‘insufficiency of feeling’; in…
Why Britain (and Europe) depends on migrants
It’s not about economics. It’s about our snobbish, slobbish culture
Cinema needs films like Chronic – just not a lot of them
Scholarly filmgoers may recall a movement that sprouted from Danish soil called Dogme 95. It worked to a Spartan set…
Some day soon we’ll all accept that useless lives should be ended
Throughout the short life of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed last week in the Commons, the ‘faith community’ (a…
The fraught business of seat surrender
I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was…
Old age is not for sissies
The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The…
Care for the dying needs more imagination – and less hospitalisation
‘To die of age is a rare, singular and extra-ordinary death’, wrote Montaigne, ‘and so much less natural than others:…
Greece is calling – three more years and then I move south
Porto Cheli I have been thinking about my children and my own strange boyhood as I gaze up at the…
The cruellest present you could give a hated old in-law
It takes a special sort of talent to be able to make drawings of your own 97-year-old mother on her…
Like Murdoch, I'm an old man with an eye for beauty. But Wendi Deng? Seriously?
Gstaad A slight bump at 30,000 feet concentrates the mind, as the good Dr Johnson said about an appointment with…
