The Latest Breaking News from Olivia Laing

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is turning 50. One of cinema’s most notorious films, Salò continues to be approached with trepidation – if approached at all.

The world of 1970s Italian cinema is the glossy backdrop for an elegantly wrought but shallow novel

THE LIST: From investigations into digital algorithms and the impact of smartphones to a history of Victoria’s Secret, there’s something for everyone in Katie Rosseinsky’s edit of 2024’s best non-fiction

As her much-loved story Rivals is turned into a lavish Disney+ production, the author answers questions from Observer readers and famous fans including David Tennant, Caitlin Moran and Gillian Anderson

A concise study of Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, and how their sexuality informed their work, veers between lecture-hall lit crit and novelistic immediacy

My sharpest experience of loneliness was during the New Year period when I turned 22. Following the breakdown of a youthful and doomed marriage, I had landed in a new country, in a city, Wellington, where the only people I had contact with were at the job I’d just started.…

When Olivia Laing began restoring a walled garden in Suffolk, the writer found that green spaces can also be sites of beauty, refuge and radical politics. They speak to Lucy Jones about their new book, ‘The Garden Against Time’

Olivia Laing's new book, 'The Garden Against Time', considers the social, political and cultural contexts of a garden

From the spectacular Tarot Garden Niki de Saint Phalle built in Tuscany to Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture oasis in St Ives, artists’ green spaces are about so much more than plants and pruning