James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
peers.
Indeed, she famously wrote a frankly postmodern and self-reflective novel called The Driver's Seat in 1970, which as the title might give away, it meditates quite deeply on questions of what sort of authorial omniscience and control and so on.
Anyway,
This is all quite boring.
And the one thing I don't want to be is boring about this absolutely brilliant, funny novel that means so much to me.
So let's get to the basics.
As those of you who know the novel, who've read the novel will know, or if you've perhaps seen a not very good film, but with an absolutely brilliant performance from 1969 by Maggie Smith of Miss Brodie,
You'll know that it's a novel about some Edinburgh schoolgirls and their teacher, Jean Brodie, who was so influential on them, but only for a very short window, between the ages of 10 and 12.
Spark was drawing here upon her own experiences in the 1930s.
And in fact, she wrote a memoir piece in The New Yorker in 1991,
about this school.
It was called James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh.
This was Spark's own school.
And that piece in the New Yorker has a lovely photograph, a school photograph of the junior class of 1930 with little Muriel Camberg as she was then in the third row.
And at the
a slightly more doer figure than we might think of if we think of Maggie Smith, a slightly more doer figure than we're expecting, Miss Christina Kay, who was the teacher in question that Spark fictionalizes in this novel.
She wrote in that piece in The New Yorker in 1991 that the average age of these high-spirited and intelligent men and women who taught us was about...
40.
They were in their prime, which means that Miss Kay was perhaps somewhat past her prime when she was teaching Muriel Kamburg, because she says that Miss Kay was actually 50.
But that's the autobiographical past that this lovely novel draws upon.
Showing 41–60 of 815 · page 3 of 41
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