Dear List,

I'm a postgrad student in Australia and I'm chasing up a full-text copy of John Gordon's review of Lolita in the British Sunday Express, Jan 1956. My university library doesn't have it even in microfilm/fiche, and neither does the State Library system- does anyone have any leads? I've found lots of snippets of it in texts and articles, but I'm keen to read a copy of the whole thing. Sorry to bother with such a trivial question!

On another note, in one of those infinitely strange echoes that seem to crop up constantly when reading Nabokov, I was just simultaneously reading Despair and Boyd's book on Pale Fire when a bizarre coincidence happened- I'd just been reading the section on Iris Acht in Boyd's text, where he talks about the fact that "'Hazel' is rare as a colour word in being so preponderantly applied to a single object, the human eye...or to be more anatomically precise, the coloured part of the eye, the iris"(160) when I stumbled across this in Despair:
"I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe for the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes"(31)

Cheers,

Sarah Holland-Batt
University of Queensland