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'Brilliant, hilarious... My book of the year' INDIA KNIGHT 'A wonderful book' CRAIG BROWN, Mail on Sunday 'Funny, bloodcurdling and moving' Daily Mail The cruel teachers. The pashes on other girls. The gossip. The giggles. The awful food. The homesickness. The friendships made for life. The shivering cold. Games of lacrosse, and cricket. 'The girls' boarding school! What a ripe theme for the most observant verbal artist in our midst today - the absurdly undersung Ysenda Maxtone Graham, who has the beadiness and nosiness of the best investigative reporter, the wit of Jane Austen and a take on life which is like no one else's. This book has been my constant companion ever since it appeared' A.N. WILSON, Evening Standard
British Summer Time Begins is about summer holidays of the mid-twentieth century and how they were spent, as recounted to Ysenda Maxtone-Graham in vividly remembered detail by people who were there. Through this prism, it paints a revealing portrait of twentieth-century Britain in summertime: how we were, how families functioned, what houses and gardens and streets were like, what journeys were like, and what people did all day in their free time. It explores their expectations, hopes, fears and habits, the rules or lack of rules under which they lived, their happiness and sadness, their sense of being treasured or neglected - all within living memory, from pre-war summers to the late 1970s....
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Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was. What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and abandonments. The story leads us from the back streets of Sheffield at the end of the Victorian age to the highest echelons of English society between the wars. Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir like the author's bestselling Cold Cream, and a voyage into a vanished moral world. An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, its cryptic and unforgettable protagonist Munca joins the ranks of memorable aunts in literature, from Dickens' Betsy Trotwood to Graham Greene's Aunt Augusta --
In 1937 the Court Page of the London Times began publishing a series of articles featuring a charming, upper-middle class English housewife named Mrs Miniver. The articles depicted an idyllically happy family with three children, a house in London, and a country cottage called Starlings. Two years later, Mrs Miniver was published in book form. While some critics derided the book as sentimental, many readers embraced it as a symbol of an increasingly endangered English way of life, and it went on to become the #1 bestseller in America. The Hollywood film, released in 1942 with Greer Garson in the title role, won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and did so much to promote the American war ...
The dean of ocean-liner historians brings to life one of the last transatlantic liners: the legendary France, later renamed Norway. As a dedicated passenger during both the vessel's lives, John Maxtone-Graham is in a perfect position to give us this rich, profusely illustrated history of France/Norway. The French Line's dazzling ocean liner S.S. France was alone in her class until the arrival of the QE2 in 1967. She was fast, chic, lavishly manned, and offered sumptuous catering. For a dozen years she was a star on the North Atlantic. However, in the summer of 1974, with jet airliners dominating transatlantic travel, France was withdrawn and allowed to molder for five years. Then a miraculous reprieve: the head of Norwegian Cruise Line decided to buy France; the vessel was revamped for warm weather and rechristened Norway. One of the last North Atlantic liners became the Caribbean's first megaship. The singularity of this incredible hull that sailed in two contrasting modes demands remembrance—she was the pioneering big ship, popularizing a scale of cruising then unknown.
Violet Jessop's life is an inspiring story of survival. Born in 1887 in Argentina, the eldest child of Irish immigrants, at the age of 21 she became the breadwinner for her widowed mother and five siblings when she commenced a career as a stewardess and nurse on some of the most famous ocean going vessels of the day. Throughout her 40 year time at sea she survived an unbelievable series of events including the sinking of the TITANIC. “One awful moment of empty, misty blackness enveloped us in its loneliness, then an unforgettable, agonizing cry went up from 1500 despairing throats, a long wail and then silence and our tiny craft tossing about at the mercy of the ice field.” For most peop...
In the spring of 1939, with the Second World War looming, two determined twenty-four-year-olds, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, decided to open a marriage bureau. Drawing on the extensive archives, Penrose Halson - who, years later, found herself the proprietor of the bureau - tells their heart-warming story, and those of their clients.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Life of a Regimental Officer During the Great War, 1793-1815" by A. F. Mockler-Ferryman. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.