SOURCE: Thomas, George. “A Good Man to Have Around.” Quadrant 39, no. 11 (November 1995): 82-3.

In the following review, Thomas elucidates the major themes of the essays in With My Trousers Rolled.

As the title's reference to Eliot's Prufrock suggests, Joseph Epstein [With My Trousers Rolled] has begun to think more of mortality, his and others'. References to ageing recur in these essays, not so morbidly that one wants to say, “Get a grip on yourself, you sprightly fifty-seven-year-old!” but often enough to constitute an occasionally disconcerting theme and to make one wonder why, given Epstein's usually irrepressible good humour.

Has the relentless youthism of modern life got to him, leaving him feeling, as he puts it, out-of-it? He notes that his generation and that of people twenty or so years younger have a fundamental difference: where his generation tend to remain fixed in their attitudes, the younger lot are...