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British TV and radio host Nicholas Parsons says he has been covering up his real age for years. Why are some people reluctant to say how old they are, asks Kathryn Westcott. Parsons, who is coming up to his 90th birthday, says that he was worried that disclosing his real age would make him unemployable. Celebrities have been holding back the years since the dawn of celluloid. Joan Crawford, for one, was evasive about her date of birth. Depending on who you read, it was 1904, 1905 or 1906. Her gravestone says 1908. My own mother took a more devil-may-care approach. Parsons - approaching a big birthday In the days when the personal details on passports were filled in by a civil servant with a Biro, my mother would subsequently alter her DOB from 1931 to 1937 with a similar-coloured pen. It worked until the 1970s, when an official at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport spotted the deceit. A fine and threat of deportation knocked that on the head. Then she carried photographs of her thr...

Becoming a judge, in any capacity, was a childhood fascination for Sonia Sotomayor. So, even as a lifelong overachiever, she exceeded her own expectations by becoming only the third woman and first Hispanic justice to be appointed to the Supreme Court. That’s even more impressive when considering the Court has been around for 224 years. Just as impressive is that Sotomayor originated from very humble means. After moving from Puerto Rico to New York’s South Bronx, her father worked as a manufacturing toolmaker and her mother as a licensed practical nurse. Things only got more dire after Sotomayor’s father died from heart complications when she was just nine. Since he spoke only Spanish, Sotomayor picked up English fluently only after he passed away. Originally, a young Sotomayor wanted to follow in the fictional footsteps of Nancy Drew by becoming a detective, but a diabetes diagnosis at age seven altered her plans. After watching an episode of court show dramaPerry Mason, her new cal...