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Being 90 |
22May 2009 |
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 Diana Athill and Denis Healey discuss what it’s like to have reached their ninth decade.
Over the last thirty years, there has been a threefold increase in the number of people reaching their nineties. More than 400,000 Britons alive today have celebrated their ninetieth Birthday and four out of every five of them is a woman. To explore the social and mental landscape of being 90, Jenni Murray is joined by two 91 year olds – the author Diana Athill and Dennis Healey, former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Both have lived through most of the twentieth century and they will talking about what it feels like to be a nonagenarian at the beginning of the 21st century.
Diana Athill is a writer and editor who has led an extraordinary life. She helped found the publishing company Andre Deutsch and was editor to some illustrious writers, such as Philip Roth, VS Naipaul, John Updike and Norman Mailer. To mark her 90th birthday in 2008 she published Somewhere Towards the End which won the Costa Biography Award that year. In it she offers original and lively observations on the lessons she has learned from life.
Denis Healey is often described as ‘the best Prime Minister that Labour never had’. During his forty years as a Member of Parliament, he held the posts of Secretary of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He now has a seat in the House of Lords and claims that; “I have always been in politics in order to do something rather than be something.” He says that his wife Edna is, and always has been, “the single most important thing in my life”.
Something Towards the End by Diana Athill is published by Granta Books,
ISBN 978-1-84708-069-1
The Time of My Life by Denis Healey is published by Penguin,
ISBY 0-7181-3114-2
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