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
So I might have to dip into that every so often.
Here are some lovely jokes and details.
What about this?
There's a moment where Spark reflects on the fact that Sandy finds Edinburgh churches quite frightening.
They seem sort of Calvinist and bleak and there's a terrifying Calvinist God inside them.
They have a sort of formidable northern stoniness about them that anyone who's been to Edinburgh, it will be
familiar with and spark reflects on the fact or sandy reflects on the fact that this is very different from say cologne cathedral whose photograph is on the wall of their of miss brody's classroom cologne cathedral by contrast looked as if it had been built for pleasure and festivities and parties given by the prodigal son in his early career
just fabulous joke that is looked as if it had been built for pleasure and festivities and parties given by the prodigal son in his early career how about this this is Miss Brodie warning Eunice that if she's not careful she'll end up a dreary suburbanite and Miss Brodie makes reference to a sort of upscale suburb of Edinburgh called Custorphine
You will end up as a girl guide leader in a suburb like Kostorfin, she said, warningly to Eunice, who was in fact secretly attracted to this idea and who lived in Kostorfin.
Later in the book, Jenny is walking in the woods beside a little burn called the Water of Leith and comes upon a flasher.
But a flasher is how you and I would describe a man, you know, half naked in the woods.
Muriel Spark, much more jauntily, describes it as a man joyfully exposing himself beside the water of Leith.
Nowadays, you'd never get away with putting that jaunty adverb, joyfully, into a description of what we all think of nowadays as a sort of traumatizing experience.
The young girl sees Caesar
naked penis but for spark everything exists for tart satire in a way but also for for complexity why shouldn't it be as well as slightly traumatizing deeply wonderful for jenny and sandy who make a whole story about this and are enamored of the female police officer who comes to take their statement it's an adventure hence a man joyfully exposing himself beside the water of leith
The flasher is joyful and in some ways the kids get pretty excited by the whole tale that they can then tell.
Welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books.
I'm James Wood, and today I'm excited to be joined by Patricia Lockwood, a regular and brilliant contributor to the London Review of Books, who has well, the formula in all these things is is she's kindly taken time away from her busy schedule.
In this case it's not a formula, um, because we're actually dragging her away from heavy labor uh related to being a Booker Prize judge.
Um so I'm very grateful to have you, Patricia, um, to talk about Nabokov's novel Phnin, uh published in nineteen fifty seven.
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