Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 (Paperback)

Brilliant, hilarious... My book of the year - India Knight

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 - Daily Mail

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 - Evening Standard

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 - The Times

If you think the St Trinian's films were fictitious, then this wonderful book will surely convince you that they were documentaries - Mail on Sunday

Sparklingly good - Evening Standard

This vivid, vivacious and poignant look at how boarding school life used to be is as engaging as it is educational - Eithne Farry, Sunday Express

A scintillating history of the mid-twentieth century girls' boarding school... this is by far the most entertaining book I have read this year - D.J. Taylor, Oldie

This vivid study of life at girls' boarding schools between 1939 and 1979 is both hilarious and poignant - Country Life