old age

High life

9 September 2023 9:00 am

The art of laziness

21 May 2022 9:00 am

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

13 November 2021 9:00 am

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

12 June 2021 9:00 am

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

15 May 2021 9:00 am

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

20 February 2021 9:00 am

I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s…

boomers seniors

Battle for the boomers

16 October 2020 5:18 am

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

22 August 2020 9:00 am

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

21 March 2020 9:00 am

‘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

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

For the last four years of her long life, this upstairs room and this magnificent sea view belonged to Mrs…

My soulmate Brian Sewell

7 September 2019 9:00 am

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

8 June 2019 9:00 am

It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year-old on the radio. You’re even less likely to hear one…

Credit: ISO3000

My life as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer for my mother

2 March 2019 9:00 am

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

23 February 2019 9:00 am

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

21 April 2018 9:00 am

New York Remember when the internet, Twitter, Facebook and other such useless gimmicks were supposed to usher in an era…

Nine angst-ridden men

16 April 2016 9:00 am

‘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

26 March 2016 9:00 am

It’s not about economics. It’s about our snobbish, slobbish culture

Tim Roth in ‘Chronic’, a morality tale about the care industry

Cinema needs films like Chronic – just not a lot of them

20 February 2016 9:00 am

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

19 September 2015 8:00 am

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

2 May 2015 9:00 am

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

7 March 2015 9:00 am

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

1 November 2014 9:00 am

‘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

9 August 2014 9:00 am

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

5 July 2014 9:00 am

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?

14 June 2014 8:00 am

 Gstaad A slight bump at 30,000 feet concentrates the mind, as the good Dr Johnson said about an appointment with…