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“... wealth, its monarch, its city of copper-roofed houses. Eventually the chimera-collecting eye of Vladimir Nabokov fell on Estoty. The horribly spry cast of Ada live in a Russo-American arcadia of the same name – a suitable metamorphosis of one kind of impossibility into another, perhaps. But the invention of Estoty also testifies to an aspect of ...”

“... all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna Karenina and tremble at ...”

“... Since his death in 1977, Nabokov has made three literary appearances: rather plodding affairs for such a gifted ghost, even allowing for their modest academic occasions and for the fact that the published texts (Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, Lectures on Don Quixote) represent scripts and drafts rather than the things themselves ...”

“... Strong Opinions​ , a collection of Nabokov’s interviews, reviews and essays published in 1973, contains an interview with the great man so brazenly bad, so shocking in each successive clause, that as long as you’re reading it, you’re dreaming of the movie version. Picture Benedict Cumberbatch hunched over a legal pad, sweating lightly, pressing Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Jared Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce ...”

“... One of the attractions of Nabokov’s view of literature is that although (or because) he scoffed at any idea of readerly independence he scarcely ever wanted to separate the writer’s interests from the reader’s. He was prepared to indulge in a kind of crazed fusion of the two in his commentary on Eugene Onegin, and to parody that madness in Pale Fire ...”

“... of these four denunciatory lines, from a poem entitled ‘On Translating Pushkin’, was the same Vladimir Nabokov who actually did the deed: that is, forced into an odd kind of English the greatest poem by his most beloved Russian poet, thereby combining in one rash act gestures of homage and of blasphemy. Nabokov’s ...”

“... I should add, something to which native English-speakers alone have access. It can be learned, as Vladimir Nabokov, for one, gloriously demonstrated. Brodsky, however, has yet to achieve that mastery and, from the evidence here, would appear to have a long way to go before he does so. The first thing he needs to acquire, if he is to make progress, is an ...”

“... years that followed the Revolution and were sustained in their exile by a sense of fabulous loss. Nabokov, whose account of his Russian childhood, Speak, Memory, must be one of the best books the Revolution produced, sometimes thought in later life of revisiting the places on which his memory fastened, while knowing that to do so would have been ...”

“... Brooke, Gide, Scott Fitzgerald and, most recently, Charles Sprawson. It is true, of course, that Vladimir Nabokov was a keen roller-skater back in Berlin in the Twenties. More recently, my own novel The Limits of Vision included an extravagantly irrelevant vignette of a Victorian roller rink. However, it remains the case that there is a distressing ...”

“... and heroines, all solitary, intrepid, self-determining figures – Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, Vladimir Nabokov – and it is most eloquently displayed in her essay on Melville’s Bartleby. As in her last volume of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, which had among its female victims and survivors a very persuasive account of Hawthorne’s Hester ...”

“... I was Lolita,’ she said – and she had been up for that part, examined by Stanley Kubrick and Vladimir Nabokov, who seemed to guess she was dangerous.You can decide that Weld never made a flawless film, or one that honours her attention, though Lord Love a Duck, Pretty Poison and Thief are in the running. She became a Circe sought out by every ...”

“... mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million ...”

“... but haunts the libraries, loos and luggage of people like T.S. Eliot, Ronald Knox, Eric Newby, Vladimir Nabokov and Umberto Eco. He even made it into Edmund Wilson’s bedroom. Although Holmes is a private detective, he’s frequently consulted by Scotland Yard and repeatedly succeeds where it fails. This leads Haia Shpayer-Makov to read in the Holmes ...”

“... Mirsky was in many ways the most defenceless of creatures. His near-contemporary and fellow exile Vladimir Nabokov invented clumsy, tender protagonists, a little greedy, a little overweight, who were easy prey for the human velociraptors who stalked them, and D.S. Mirsky had a certain resemblance to those victims. He was terribly lonely in his London ...”

“... Koestenbaum, not to mention David Sedaris (not Jewish) – reminds me of Steve. It also includes Vladimir Nabokov (not Jewish), whose own lectures (now published) were really written – and this is why I mention him – by Vera, his wife. Have I, then, become Grover Cleveland? Will I do so? Perhaps. But it won’t be because I’ll have identified with ...”