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
Of Miss Brodie's control of them, her need to write scripts for these girls, and in particular, her need to write a script in which, say, Rose, who she thinks of as like a heroine from a D.H.
Lawrence novel, should have an affair with Mr. Lloyd, the art teacher, almost a kind of proxy for Miss Brodie's inability to have an affair with the art teacher.
Miss Brody's continually writing these, she's writing the future of her girls.
And it's the job of Sandy, who is a kind of de facto narrator of the book and who sees through Miss Brody.
It's Sandy's job to go about essentially deconstructing the stories that Miss Brody tells about her girls.
The most important being that it will be Sandy who actually sleeps with Mr. Lloyd, the art teacher.
And she will, in her Sandy-like way, simply bluntly tell Miss Brodie towards the end of the book that that is what has happened.
It's also Sandy who will eventually betray Miss Brodie and get her booted out of the school in 1939.
And it's very characteristic, we were talking about the form, it's very characteristic of this novel that that secret, the whodunit element,
Who betrayed Miss Brodie is not, as it would be in a conventional realist novel, hoarded and then rationed and then given to us at the end of the book, but is in fact disclosed early on in the book.
There's no question about who betrayed Miss Brodie.
It's Sandy, and we're not in any doubt about that.
Lovely, lovely jokes and details.
As we did going back all the way to Madame Bovary, we're going to take a moment just to enjoy these fabulous, it's an extremely funny book, these funny lines and this may involve a warning here.
This may involve me having to do a kind of Maggie Smith, Anglo-Scottish Edinburgh accent.
I certainly don't do it as well as Maggie Smith, but I have some experience in this because my mother, and this is a tale I will come back to at the end of this podcast.
My mother was essentially Miss Brodie.
She was a schoolteacher who taught at the Durham High School for girls.
Indeed, I have a wonderful Brodiesque photograph of her from 1972 with her girls sitting as Miss Kay is sitting in that photograph from 1930, right in the middle of the group of 12-year-old girls.
My mum was Scottish, like Miss Brodie, and like Miss Brodie, had a slightly sort of bogus, posh Anglo Scottish Edinburgh accent, which became more Edinburgh-ish when she was teaching.
Showing 121–140 of 815 · page 7 of 41
← Previous
Next →