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
And so there is this moment of kind of like... These funny loopholes all the way, like if this had happened, then this would have happened.
Although they did in the end.
And then I suppose in some ways, although it's a kind of pained account of education, it is also clearly a lament for an education system that doesn't exist, not because the degrees themselves don't exist, but because the cultural situation around education has changed so dramatically because education isn't regarded with the level of seriousness that it was even then.
Do you think that education is still a thing that a person could go out and find?
Yeah.
Yeah, what question would you like to ask yourself?
I'm in charge.
What do you think about Charmin, B?
Because in a lot of ways, this is a book about realizing that you are reading like a writer because you are slowly becoming a writer, although you believe that you're becoming an academic.
That's how it felt to me, like this sort of unacknowledged thing is that you are attracted to things because you're attracted by how they are written because you're interested in how to write, but you don't realise that.
Yeah.
It does.
It feels like there's sort of a lot of depth charges inside this book.
There's a lot of...
In a way, it's funny.
It feels like your most personal book, although it's not particularly revelatory no more than anything else you've written.
But there's a lot of quite clear streams of feeling in it.
This is probably my last question before we open it out to the universe, but I mean the audience.
It returns to the territory of In the Dark Room, which is about the death of your parents and the sort of the chaotic period that followed.
And I wondered how much time made a difference in going back to that story, how different it felt to return to that sort of that house, that bedroom, that sofa where you're reading.
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