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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Once Big Ben strikes, the vibrations of the sound go out from the clock, out through Westminster where the Dalloways live.
And then we might think of the novel's portrait of a certain kind of English society and power as a series of concentric circles.
If you have this kind of power, then you have the kind of power that Keynes is talking about, to order things up, to prospect in other countries.
Messages, as Woolf puts it, were passing from the fleet to the admiralty in this kind of London.
And as Mrs. Dalloway goes out to buy flowers for the party she will have later on in the day, so she sees a mysterious car, a grand car with dove-grey upholstery that seems to be slowly making its way through the nicer parts of London.
Who is in it?
Is it the Queen?
Is it the Prime Minister?
Some Duke?
Someone of importance, that's for sure.
But what about this marvelous description as the prime minister's car, let's say it's the prime minister's car, passes one of the gentleman's clubs in St.
James's.
It's the club White's.
And we just get this little description.
Wolf sort of goes inside the club.
The white busts and the little tables in the background, covered with copies of the Tatler and siphons of soda water, seemed to approve, that's to say, seemed to approve of whoever was in the car, seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor houses of England.
So it's a novel that starting in London can take in the whole entitled country and then in concentric circles of entitlement take in the whole world.
In that sense, we might think of the book, though it's nothing like, say, Bleak House.
But we might think of it as having in its compressed way something of the ambition of, say, Dickens' Bleak House that can muse and brood over an enormous gallery of people all gathered together in London.
Showing 581–600 of 815 · page 30 of 41
← Previous
Next →