Out of it
Rosalind Mitchison, 5 April 1990
History of Old Age
by Georges Minois, translated by Sarah HanburyTenison.
Polity, 343 pp., £29.50, September 1989,0 7456 0549 4 Show More
by Georges Minois, translated by Sarah HanburyTenison.
Polity, 343 pp., £29.50, September 1989,
A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age
by Peter Laslett.
Weidenfeld, 213 pp., £16.95, September 1989,0 297 79451 5 Show More
by Peter Laslett.
Weidenfeld, 213 pp., £16.95, September 1989,
“... These two writers are both concerned with the old and the elderly, but to very different effect. Minois presents a repertoire of comments on the old, from the ancient world to the 16th century: most comments are hostile. Girning about the disagreeable features of the old seems to have been a recognised literary form. Writers experimented with new nasty similes or enlarged upon a repertoire of unpleasant features ... ”
