Category: Scholarship

Our new 21st century Third Age is calling forth so many semi-scholarly books which cannot decide whether their goal is to achieve dispassionate social analysis or to offer superior self-help guidance. So it is with The Happiness Curve. From whatever perspective, this is not good karma. But firstly a thought experiment... Imagine you are 75 years of age this very day. Coincidentally contacted by a respectable research agency, you are invited to rate your general level of personal happiness / life satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 (where 10 would equal totally blissed-out). You agree to participate. But a silent inhibition tugs at your guts. “If I say that I am, in fact, dreadfully unhappy, will the whole world know that my whole life has ipso facto been a failure?…

This book is a monumental accomplishment. In the rapids of the Left Bank in the 1940s, some hardcore artistic talent survived the Nazi Occupation and founded the various versions of liberation which still enrich the West today. (more…)

Well, first of all, this is a book so well written that one’s faith in American non-fiction letters is almost restored in one go. (more…)

You are, one way or another, perhaps in the age business. Your company is trying to build a rich dialogue with older shoppers, tourists, students… Your campaigning organisation lobbies for better treatment for elderly patients, grey voters, the locally bereaved and bereft... Your political party has to consider how the sexa-septua-octogenarians ought to be addressed, captured and, the bitter thought, afforded... (more…)