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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But you worry... I made a list of the ones that I thought you mentioned along the way.
The anxiety of pretentiousness, of earnestness, of being a poser, of sentimentality, of self-seriousness.
And I thought that that gave you a really good sense of where Anglo-Saxon culture was at at that moment, that those sort of...
fears of thinking, fears around highbrow art, told you a great deal about the sort of middlebrow status of mainstream culture.
Which encodes all kinds of things like Europe, like high modernism.
But those accusations do sort of haunt you and your brother says it to you and you're very anxious about it.
But not English either.
Something else.
Education takes you from somewhere to somewhere else.
And then is that self-force or not?
He has taste.
He starts with taste and then he constructs himself from that.
B gets to university eventually, but his problems don't end there.
And you actually touched on that in the extract that you read, this sense that B is this person who is a passionate, obsessive reader.
And on the one hand, going to university and doing an English degree means
That is his field.
That is his world.
He's spending time looking at books.
But there's an anxiety attached to that, which is about what happens if I bring the sort of knife of critique on these beloved objects?
Am I going to open them up and find the thing that I have always felt pulsing away in them?
Showing 661–680 of 938 · page 34 of 47
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