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
But it gives you a sense of the two central characters.
Danilo Donati, who's a real person.
He was an Italian costume designer.
He was a set designer.
He was an extraordinary and kind of quite unsung talent.
Even initially, he isn't nearly as well known as the two...
lead figures in this, which are Fellini and Pasolini.
And Danilo is here at the beginning of his romance with a character who is completely fictional, Nicholas, an English boy who finds himself in this sort of world of Italian cinema, glamour and danger.
It's not that Danilo has been regretting his decision exactly, but the boy is a burden, an undeniable weight in his days.
His Italian is good, he's quick, his drawings are superlative, almost as good as Danny's own.
But he's out of his depth, an unlicked cub far from home.
Danny could send him away.
Of course he could.
Or he could dedicate himself to doing some licking.
It's not just the rawness, though.
Nico has exposed him in a way he doesn't quite like, a way he failed to account for.
Makes him look middle-aged, a cliché, losing his head over someone so young, so pretty.
But, but, on the other side of the balance sheet is Nicholas himself, his incredible knack for accommodating himself to what is needed.
He does it, and at the same time he laughs at himself for the perfection of his performance.
It's his doubleness that fascinates Danny, his capacity to see himself from the outside, the conspiratorial, intimate way he has of turning everything into a play that only the two of them can understand.
Showing 21–40 of 938 · page 2 of 47
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