By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Growing old’s like being increasingly penalised for a crime you haven’t committed.’ So said the great novelist Anthony Powell, summing up the sense of injustice that accompanies the onset of old age. There’s even a word for a fear of growing old: gerascophobia. In one of his less famous poems, the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88) wondered what it means to grow old.