You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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....
'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
A biography of Jan Struther
None
A gently humorous take on the modern world - from the pitfalls of knicker-envy to the weaponising of email sign-offs Screams is Ysenda Maxtone Graham's idiosyncratic and gently funny take on the modern world. She pinpoints all those small things that irritate, but which have a disproportionate effect on our wellbeing (for example, agonising waits for HMRC while stuck in a loop playing the Four Seasons; deep-seated recycling fears; friends that gaslight you with too many xxxs) and also takes pleasure in the small victories that bring surprising joy (lunch from leftovers and finding a miraculous parking space against all odds).
The beloved classic novel of an English housewife bravely enduring WWII—the basis for the Academy Award–winning film starring Greer Garson. Winston Churchill once remarked that Mrs. Miniver, the fictional British housewife featured in Jan Struther’s newspaper columns about quotidian English life, did more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships. As tensions rose across Europe, Mrs. Miniver’s domestic concerns expanded from automobiles and Christmas shopping to include gas masks, keeping calm, and carrying on. An international sensation when it was first published, this novelized collection of those columns won America’s heart—and broad public support for entering WWII. Mrs. Miniver’s story was so essential to Allied morale that when William Wyler’s film adaption was made, President Roosevelt ordered it rushed to theaters.
From the bestselling author of the memoir Cold Cream comes the affectionate, bizarre, tragi-comical tale of Aunt Munca
None
The thrilling and definitive account of the Abdication Crisis of 1936 On December 10, 1936, King Edward VIII brought a great international drama to a close when he abdicated, renouncing the throne of the United Kingdom for himself and his heirs. The reason he gave when addressing his subjects was that he could not fulfill his duties without the woman he loved—the notorious American divorcee Wallis Simpson—by his side. His actions scandalized the establishment, who were desperate to avoid an international embarrassment at a time when war seemed imminent. That the King was rumored to have Nazi sympathies only strengthened their determination that he should be forced off the throne, by any ...