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 it's incredibly difficult.
I mean, just to give you an idea, chapter one begins actually in 1936.
So chapter one begins with the girls who were in Miss Brody's so-called set, the ones she favoured.
They're now 16.
They're well past their two years, 10 to 12, that they spent with Miss Brodie.
And now they're in the senior school.
They're not in the junior school anymore, and they're sort of floating with boys and so on.
That's 1936.
Then in the same chapter, after, what, a page and a half...
The novel takes us back to 1930 when they were 10 years old, then goes forward again to 1936, then back again to when these girls were in Miss Brodie's care at the age of 10.
Then we get to the end of that chapter and we open chapter two and we have a flash forward immediately to 1943.
We're in the middle of the Second World War, and poor Mary McGregor, who was never really much liked by anyone and was always slightly bullied by Miss Brody, is about to die.
She's dying in a hotel fire.
And that's how the book proceeds.
It really, it goes back and forward and it's famous for these quite remarkable flash forwards.
We're continually being taken out of the chronological movement of the novel and told about what became of these girls when they were older.
And we're told that Eunice, 28 years after doing the splits on the floor of Miss Brodie's flat in Edinburgh, now a nurse and married to a doctor,
is sitting with her husband and wants to tell him about Miss Brodie and the importance that she had for her.
We're told later that Eunice, in the middle of her marriage, will have a sort of kind of erotic moment standing next to a man in Rome where she's tempted
To stray from her marriage.
Showing 81–100 of 815 · page 5 of 41
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