Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The joy of party bags

27 July 2024 9:00 am

The perfect, unpretentious, well-constructed party bag was given to guests leaving a recent Hatchards party. It contained a wedge of…

My prep school scarred me for life

6 April 2024 9:00 am

‘A part of me died at school’, Charles Spencer writes in his shockingly stark account of sadism and sexual abuse at Maidwell Hall, Northamptonshire, in the 1970s

Death of a choir

30 March 2024 9:00 am

Please stop clapping at funerals

2 March 2024 9:00 am

The Happy Clappies – evangelical Christians who clap along to worship songs during church services – have been around since…

In the dark early 1960s, at least we had the Beatles

9 December 2023 9:00 am

The first half of the decade saw towns bulldozed, the Beeching cuts, everyday racism, political scandal and the threat of Armageddon. But there was also Beatlemania…

Hell is a heat pump

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Hell is a heat pump

Frozen food

2 September 2023 9:00 am

Beware of pity

29 July 2023 9:00 am

In her powerful memoir-cum-manifesto, Selina Mills tells us what she misses most, what irritates her most and why she won’t have a guide dog

Aperol spritz

1 July 2023 9:00 am

A last-minute escape from the Holocaust

10 June 2023 9:00 am

In a profoundly moving family memoir, Daniel Finkelstein describes the miracle by which his mother, as a child, was rescued from the hell of Belsen

The sadness of Britain’s seaside resorts

6 May 2023 9:00 am

Their decline began with the arrival of package holidays in the 1960s – and new schemes for their revival seem already to have backfired

The madness of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods

8 April 2023 9:00 am

The madness of the Low Traffic Neighbourhood measures

My search for London’s cheapest flat

4 March 2023 9:00 am

My hunt for the cheapest property in London

The puppetry renaissance

17 December 2022 9:00 am

Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…

The joy of loathing the Qatar World Cup

5 November 2022 9:00 am

I’ll miss hating the Qatar World Cup

The glamour and romance of London’s vanished department stores

15 October 2022 9:00 am

There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores.…

The parallel universe you can explore on two wheels

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own…

Spare us the preaching: The Railway Children Return reviewed

30 July 2022 9:00 am

It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on…

The pernicious creep of the 20mph zone

9 July 2022 9:00 am

The blight of the 20mph speed limit

I’m being priced out of eating out

28 May 2022 9:00 am

Restaurant prices are no longer worth it

Sister, where are you? – Clover Stroud mourns her beloved sibling

5 March 2022 9:00 am

‘CERTIFICATE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF IDENTITY,’ the freshly issued death certificate read. In the craziness and shock of grief for…