7 APRIL 1990, Page 26

Face the fifties

Sir: Orwell may well have once said, as your excellent Timothy Garton Ash writes ('New faces for old', 17 March), that at 50 everyone has the face he deserves. But he was hardly the first person to say it. It is a venerable statement on this side of the Atlantic, generally attributed to Lincoln, though I note that Mencken in his New Dictionary of Quotations (1942) attributes it in a slightly different form ('A man of fifty is responsible for his face') to Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War.

Arthur Schlesinger

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