Getting old. It's better than the alternative, right? But the way Britons think about retirement and old age has changed enormously since the second world war. Some of us seize the chance to emigrate to sunnier places. Others find themselves living in a society with a tendency to regard the elderly as an asset-rich burden on the public finances.

Should the state pension age keep rising? Are politicians, many of whom never truly retire, the right people to order the rest of us to keep working for longer?

Ros Taylor talks to Helen McCarthy, Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History at the University of Cambridge. She is writing a social and cultural history of retirement since 1945, to be published by Penguin (Allen Lane). Her article on Brits retiring overseas is available to read.

The extract from Beveridge: The Problem of Old Age is at the Socialist Health Association.

Jeremy Seabrook wrote about old age for the Guardian in 2010. His books include A World Growing Old.

The Thames TV report about pensioner Dick is available on YouTube, as is the 1981 interview with Margaret Thatcher and a 1969 BBC documentary about retirees abroad.

I also drew on the Guardian's obituary of Kingsley Amis, Commons library briefings on pensions in the UK and the communication of state pension age increases for women born in the 1950s, Finishing the job: launching the Pensions Commission and the Institute of Fiscal Studies' history of state pensions,

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