Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Graham, Ysenda Maxtone

Graham, Ysenda Maxtone

Ysenda Maxtone Graham has written widely for many newspapers and magazines, as features writer, book reviewer and columnist.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [14] 72; [32] 24; [36] 68; [38] 20; [40] 88; [44] 26; [52] 13; [54] 7; [56] 65; [63] 55; [69] 87; [75] 12; [80] 20; [84] 13; Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, [31] 12; The Real Mrs Miniver, [37] 12; Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939–1979, [52] 13

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20220901102007 The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49: Nella Last’s War - Slightly Foxed Edition

An Extraordinary Ordinary Housewife

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Nella Last’s War

To her readers at the headquarters of the Mass Observation organization in London, she was merely a number (diarist 5353), an occupation (housewife), and an age (49). The labelling was bureaucratic and impersonal, but it was this very anonymity that gave Nella Last (1889‒1968) the psychological freedom to tell the truth about her life, making her wartime diaries the raw, revealing testimony that they are.
20210301101510

Making a Meal of It

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Plot: towards lunchtime, a male employee in a large corporate office building (the first-person narrator) discovers that the shoelace of his left shoe has snapped precisely twenty-eight hours after the right one snapped: a thought-provoking coincidence. Clutching his Penguin copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and pausing first for a pee in the men’s room, he descends the escalator to buy a bag of popcorn, a hot-dog, a cookie, a carton of milk and a new pair of shoelaces. Then he goes back up the escalator to his office, carrying his small bags. That’s it.
20070601151954

Flight of the Ladybird

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the Ladybird Books

Quick: bring something to read to him on the train! This last-minute thought, just before setting the burglar alarm, sends me rushing to the pair of small bookshelves outside the bathroom which contain the old Ladybird books. Which of them shall we take? Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Florence Nightingale, The Princess and the Pea, The Fireman. They’ll do. They fit into the handbag, and I set out knowing that, even if we run out of water and KitKats, and there’s no refreshment trolley, we’ll have enough mental nourishment to keep us going through whatever South West Trains might inflict on us.
20190901104651 Ysenda Maxtone Graham, the poetry of Jan Struther, E. H. Shepard illustration

Hitting the Nail on the Head

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the poetry of Jan Struther

1. Jan Struther, the well-known and successful writer, lecturer, radio performer etc. (with a subdivision called Jan Struther, the much-too-little-known and really pretty terrific serious poet whose depth and brilliance will only really be appreciated by a discerning literary public after she is dead!) That ‘item no. 1’ was the first on a list concocted by my grandmother Jan Struther in a letter to her brother Douglas in 1951.
20171201145202

Well-Salted

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the Oxford Junior Encyclopedia

Did we all have someone in our childhood who was The Best Giver of Presents? In my case, it was a family friend called Vere Guilford. She entered deeply enough into the person you were to get presents right. At the perfect moment she gave me a lockable cassette box. When my soul was starting to ache she gave me a double-cassette pack of Beethoven symphonies. At Christmas 1974 (I remember the mild disappointment on unwrapping it) she gave me Volume I of the twelve-volume Oxford Junior Encyclopedia.
20170601115202 Photograph, Ella Maillart & Peter Fleming - Ysenda Maxtone Graham

An Unlikely Duo

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Peter Fleming, News from Tartary & Ella Maillart, Forbidden Journey

Is it acceptable to be both happily married to a living man and physically attracted to a long-dead author? I know I’m not the only one. I have one friend who goes weak at the knees when she shows me photos of the late Patrick Leigh Fermor, and another who has a lasting physical pash for Joseph Banks (1743‒1820). Mine is for Peter Fleming (1907‒71), older brother of Ian.

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