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
And I mentioned the school photograph, which adorns this piece that Spark wrote in 1991.
Because in some ways, when I try to think about the extraordinary form of this novel, what I actually think of is someone, an author, holding a stack of snaps, of snapshots, and sort of shuffling them around so that they're not quite, maybe there's a deep chronology that you go through, but every sort of, as it were, every third photograph will take us out of chronology.
And crucially, each photograph will offer only a picture and not something deeper so that we look at the photograph, we turn it around and we want something else.
But we're not necessarily given it in the novel.
After all, we look at school photographs like this and we think, what do we know of these people?
What did we know of them?
I mean, here I am sitting in the third row and I'm next to Jenny, who was my best friend for one year.
And on the other side is Mary, who I didn't like, but
But what did I really... And with both those girls, I failed to keep in touch after, you know, age of 18.
What did I really know about them when I was at school?
And the photograph keeps, if we think of a school photograph, it keeps on goading us in this way because we look at these faces that stare out from the school seats.
We look at Christina Kay looking at us and we think, well, I thought I knew her because she really was the most important person in my life for two years.
But what did I really know of her?
The novel is very like that, I think.
It shuffles these pictures.
So we get sort of Miss Brody upbraiding poor Mary McGregor, Miss Brody telling Sandy that Rose will sleep with Mr. Lloyd, Miss Brody after the Second World War, now out of work, betrayed, sitting in the Braid Hills Hotel, telling Sandy that she was betrayed and musing about who had betrayed her.
We get Eunice, 28 years later, well after her schooling, telling her husband about how important Miss Brodie was.
But in Spark's very characteristic way of writing, these are pictures.
These are scenes that are sort of cut off as quickly as they are started so that it's a very curious, interrupted form.
I actually just I once tried to do a diagram where I diagrammed out the entire just by date dates, the mise en scene of the novel.
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