Olivia Laing
speaker
938 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Aug
Olivia Laing’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So I feel like people have got not very strong stomachs.
There was not even any blood in that play.
What were people thinking?
Yeah.
So for people who haven't seen it and don't know what it is, it is 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade.
It's a version of that set in Italy at the end of the Second World War in the Republic of Salo.
So Mussolini's fascist, phony fascist, I mean, real fascist, but puppet republic, which is actually a Nazi republic.
And the sense of it is that it's this sort of decadence of evil, the last days of these people's
reign of terror and they are libertines interestingly also like casanova these both
about libertines and they take a bunch of young people captive in a beautiful italian exquisite italian villa
It's a film of absolute aesthetic chilliness and perfection.
And they tell stories and they torment them and then they murder them in various graphic and horrific ways.
It is, I think, kind of an allegory, a fairy tale, a dark fairy tale about fascism.
And for me, it's not just about fascism.
The spectacle of horror, it's about two things that I think have become more and more significant in our own times, which is two ways that people respond when fascism comes to call.
One of those is complicity.
And I think we're seeing an awful lot of that right now.
People want to be complicit with power.
People want to station themselves close to power.
They want to turn a blind eye to it or indeed indulge in it.
Showing 221–240 of 938 · page 12 of 47
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