Word: humbert
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...America before World War II, he painstakingly learned every nuance of English and translated his works back and forth in an effort to find a wider audience. He achieved notoriety before legitimate fame in 1958 with Lolita, and Field argues that the book, in which 42-year-old Humbert Humbert lusts for a child of twelve, would not have shocked nearly so much if readers had understood Nabokov's deeper preoccupations...
...novel of prisons." The idea for it came to Nabokov from a Paris newspaper account of a monkey who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Humbert Humbert is a prisoner of lust. He imprisons first Lolita, then his deadly rival Quilty. Later he writes his memoirs from prison. For Nabokov, the book's theme is love-and the necessity to liberate love from "its extreme and seemingly mutually exclusive opposite, lechery." Eventually Humbert Humbert is able...
...battlefields, the Viet Cong were still making war in their own macabre way. Two American prisoners of war, Captain Humbert R. Versace and Sergeant Kenneth M. Roraback, were executed by the Communists in reprisal for Saigon's shooting of three Danang agitators. The Reds' disregard of the Geneva Convention could only be termed murder-which is precisely what the U.S. branded it last week...
...being definitive." Michael Redgrave "played it like Barbara Stanwyck with a mustache." Gielgud? "I guess he thought Richard was a neurasthenic who could cry at the drop of a crown." As for the play itself, in which Richard's queen is a young child, Hutt says: "It out-Humberts Humbert. It should be retitled Take Her, She's Nine...
...them whenever they sing. One called Sheila wears bows in her hair and is imitated by women who really see themselves as hoydens un-demolished. Another, Francoise, is long and lissome, with a long mane, long shanks, and good possibilities in the sixth at Longchamps. But all the Humbert Humberts, three-quarters of the Lucky Pierres, and half the women of France reserve their special attention for 19-year-old Sylvie Vartan, a beautiful blonde in the rinsed and leggy French tradition, with a mouth like a tulip and the look of a middle-aged child. She is their Chouchou...