Sophie Gee

It's sensational nature writing for anyone who loves nature writing.

It's a gripping piece of social storytelling.

It's a modern Dickens novel, isn't it?

I think reading orchestral for a knave, even though it was written 60 years ago, I,

I think one has the closest sensation you can have to what it would have been like to have read a Dickens novel at the time, where you feel that sense of identification and connection to the characters and at the same time you find them sort of funny and they show incredible spirit.

It's incredibly interesting.

One of the things that I was thinking a lot about as I was reading A Kestrel for a Knave is, you know, so far as we've read through Tom Brown's school days, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and now A Kestrel for a Knave, what's it telling us is the function of a school and the function of a school story.

And it's almost like a sort of microcosm of the nation and a microcosm of the sort of anxieties and self-questionings and areas of dysfunction that...

maybe not the nation as a whole is facing, but that large parts of the country, large areas are kind of confronting at the time that the novel is written.

So in Thomas Arnold's Rugby, which is the setting of Tom Brown's School Days, the issue is the empire.

How do we maintain the empire?

And the public school system is seen as the kind of mechanism by which to do so.

And educational reform is all oriented in that direction.

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, as we said, is really about the sort of intellectual ferment and radicalism and excitement and European identity of Edinburgh as a city.

The idea that Scotland is a place apart from the rest of Britain.

And I think the idea in A Kestrel for a Knave is that this immovable class hierarchy, social hierarchy, class,

labour hierarchy that just defines Britain and has done for centuries and centuries is now visible in the school system.

So the wonderful epigraph for orchestral for a knave is from something that some listeners will know what it is, a text called the Book of St Albans from 1486.

It's a manuscript book.

And the quote is, an eagle for an emperor, a guy falcon for a king, a peregrine for a prince, a saker for a knight, a merlin for a lady, a goshawk for a yeoman, a sparrowhawk for a priest, a musket for a holy water clerk, a kestrel for a knave.