‘The big things that can still happen to you are the loss of your sexual function and death.’ This was how conductor Colin Davis, then 38, viewed the prospect of turning 40 when the Observer surveyed ‘distinguished and candid’ mid-lifers in 1966.
There are other marmalade-droppers – novelist Philip Toynbee’s assertion that 40 for a woman meant: ‘You’re beginning to get stout and lose your looks’, for one – but most were more reflective, considering love, desire, work and ambition.
