‘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 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
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Reviews
This vivid study of life at girls' boarding schools between 1939 and 1979 is both hilarious and poignant
Sparklingly good
Brilliant, hilarious... My book of the year
A scintillating history of the mid-twentieth century girls' boarding school... this is by far the most entertaining book I have read this year
If you think the St Trinian's films were fictitious, then this wonderful book will surely convince you that they were documentaries
The girls' boarding school! What a ripe theme for the most observant verbal artist in our midst today - the absurdly underrated and 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 few months ago
This vivid, vivacious and poignant look at how boarding school life used to be is as engaging as it is educational
A rich read... Ysenda Maxtone Graham has drawn aside the curtain on the hermetic, arcane world of the mid-twentieth-century girls' boarding school, which we all believed to be weird, but few of us - unless we were there - realized was as eccentric, hilariously funny, cruel, terrifying, snobbish, rapturous and emotionally intense as the profoundly outlandish environment portrayed in these pages... Terms & Conditions is a funny, vivid and excruciating book, which has left me filled with admiration for the brave, damaged survivors of this lost world
Funny, bloodcurdling and moving... this will make old boarding-school girls sigh with nostalgia, and everyone else sigh with relief at having avoided the experience