Many of today's generation of women get a new lease of life at 60, while men only get slower, says business guru Charles Handy. Now he and his photographer wife, Elizabeth, have compiled a book of essays by women in their 60s. Arminta Wallace reports.

'We're a double act," says Charles Handy cheerfully, helping himself to another cup of coffee while his wife Elizabeth discusses the finer points of medium-format cameras and digital film with our photographer. He isn't kidding.

Charles and Elizabeth Handy have been married for 40 years. They live together, work together and write books together. At least, Charles - one of the more successful of the current crop of business gurus, with a string of bestsellers and a lucrative career as a public speaker to his credit - writes the books. Elizabeth is agent, publicist, organiser, manager and, latterly, portrait photographer. They are here to answer questions about their latest book, Reinvented Lives, but the real question, surely, is - how do they do all this without driving each other mad?

"I think," says Elizabeth firmly, "the great thing is to have your own space. When I was 60 I got my own study and my own darkroom."

Charles beams. "I'm not allowed in," he declares, with a chuckle.

"A lot of women," Elizabeth continues, without missing a beat, "don't demand space. They use the kitchen table or the spare room or they move from place to place, which is what I'd been doing for years. But we couldn't possibly share the same work space, anyhow. I work in a complete tip. Like here, look . . ." She waves her hand, and sure enough, her corner of the Shelbourne Hotel's elegant array of tables and couches has been transformed into a mini-campsite, all bags, boxes and bits and pieces. "I've created a tip in no time at all, whereas Charles is far more tidy . . ."

"But," retorts Charles, "if I enter her space she says, 'What do you want?' So in a sense, we work in the same house, we meet for breakfast, coffee, lunch, tea and dinner. But that's about it . . ."

The Handys also go to parties together, which is how they came up with the idea for Reinvented Lives. "It was at the 60th birthday party of a friend that it struck us: 60 is no longer what it used to be - not for women, anyway," writes Charles in the introduction to this series of essays by, and portraits of, some uncommonly sprightly 60-year-olds.

"I've never been able to stand 'old' people," begins the chapter by Body Shop billionaire Anita Roddick, while Irish-based artist Pauline Bewick says she used to think 60 was incredibly old and the writer Allegra Taylor ends her chapter with a list of her current projects: a novel, a healing practice, writing workshops, salsa lessons. "With one artificial hip joint, two mutilated breasts and ever stronger spectacles, I tango on into the sunset," she concludes.

The stories the women tell are diverse, their personalities as various as their hairstyles and taste in clothes. Some of the names are well-known, some aren't. One sixtysomething was ordained a priest; another fell in love with Antarctica. How did the authors get the mix right?

"They all started as friends," says Elizabeth. "We wanted diversity, but we weren't very systematic about it."

"But," Charles points out, "we did have a quota, in that we wanted one business person, one author, somebody who'd been widowed, someone who had never been married, someone who was gay . . ."

Was there any category they couldn't fill? "I wanted to find somebody who had had a facelift, actually," admits Elizabeth. "But really, we had too many by that stage and we didn't want the book to be too long. We want people to read it and say, 'Well, I can do what I want to do - other people have, despite their difficulties and problems'."

Difficulties and problems notwithstanding, the book is notably upbeat. Or is it just that the Handys don't have any friends who fail at anything?

"It's very interesting, when you ask people to write about their lives, what they choose to focus on," says Charles. "There used to be a column in a Sunday newspaper called 'My Worst Mistake' - and of course the mistakes always turned out to be wonderful learning experiences. So it depends how you define things. These women do write about problems in their lives; but we didn't have anybody who was living through a disaster."

"Well, we did, actually," Elizabeth puts in. "The girl whose 60th birthday party gave us the idea. Her husband left her six months later. When I did her portrait, she had all kinds of plans - by the time the book came to be published, she had a different kind of life, and she wrote about coming to terms with this new life. It was terrific therapy for her, in a way."

"Yes," says Charles, "it's an extraordinary thing - if you can talk about some disaster that has happened to you, it no longer eats away at you. I think writing your life for public consumption is a form of therapy, actually."

He's in a good position to judge. His own life has just appeared in paperback in the form of The Elephant and the Flea, a series of affable meditations on everything from growing up in a rectory in Sallins, Co Kildare, to the latest in socio-economic buzz-phrases; stealth wealth, peer-to-peer technology, the portfolio lifestyle.

Work, for Handy, has meant a variety of jobs from Warden of St George's House at Windsor Castle to marketing executive with Shell in the Far East.

'Most of my life is a nonsense, really," he declares, with another broad grin. "But I wouldn't have it otherwise, because it all somehow created me - for better or for worse."

The women whose stories are told in Reinvented Lives would probably agree with him. Will the Handys do a book about sixtysomething men, now, for the sake of political correctness? "Oh, men don't reinvent themselves, as a general rule," says Charles. "They go on doing much the same thing, only slower. Some do change totally, of course, but not as many. It seems to me that women bottle up a piece of themselves while they do all the things they have to do, like raising families - and suddenly they're able to release all this energy." Like Elizabeth, who took a degree in photography at 50.

Charles Handy knows as well as anyone that books can set agendas and change trends. If the good news is that life begins at 60, the bad news may be just around the corner. After all, if word gets around that sixtysomethings are starting businesses and looking glamorous instead of hobbling to the Post Office on pension day, governments may just be tempted to start tinkering with traditional definitions of such words as "elderly" and "support".

"Oh, absolutely," says Elizabeth Handy. "I reckon we'll probably be the last generation with a bus pass."

"And," adds Charles, "the pension age will almost certainly go up over the next 20 years. The other thing is that organisations will be getting rid of people earlier, because working in organisations demands far more of people's energy and time these days, so they burn out and get fed up. So people are going to have to find some way of working independently between their late 50s and their early 70s - they're all going to have to reinvent themselves, in some ways. It's a big challenge for society, and people haven't quite taken it on board yet. They still think that when they reach 60 they'll have a nice income and can play golf all day. I don't think it's going to be like that."

Reinvented Lives is published by Random House (£18.99). The Elephant and the Flea is published by Arrow (£7.99)