Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Now more than ever it seems right to read Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita (1955). The man who famously described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia” understands his adopted country as only an immigrant can.

Born into Russian nobility, Nabokov fled for his life twice: first escaping the 1917 Revolution for Berlin and Paris, and then, in 1940, fleeing Nazi-era Paris for New York City alongside his Jewish wife, Véra. A respected lepidopterist, Nabokov spent years working at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The immigrant, the scientist and the novelist brought all he knew about camouflage, metamorphosis, mimicry, migration and classification to his writing.

Lolita combines Nabokov’s keen observations of the new, post-World War II superpower that was late 1940s America with his scalpel-like dexterity with the English language.

One of the world’s most banned books? Yes.

A savage send-up of a country awash in Norman Rockwell imagery and pop psychology? A land where clueless elites become intellectually complicit in a world that infantilises adults while sexualising children? Yes.

Narrated through the notoriously unreliable perspective of one Humbert Humbert, aka Paedophile-in-Chief? Yes.

Hilarious and infuriating by turns, but always mesmerising? Yes.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-meeting study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein
• 17 September – 5 November 2026
• Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK time)
• £320 for eight two-hour meetings
• Recommended edition The Annotated Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000): ISBN: 978-0141185040