You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent -- Martin Amis - Observer

A masterpiece. One of the great works of art of our age - Independent

His command of words, his joy in them, his comic and ecstatic use of them...makes reading his work such an intense joy - Daily Telegraph

Lolita is more the shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny ... a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes - Time

A great novel ... It widens our own humanity - Guardian

There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert. Going to hell in his company would always be worth the ride - Independent

Redeeming, spendid, headlong, endlessly comic and evocative -- John Updike

Rapturous ... incendiary - Time Out

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.