Face of the Day

“Lolita will never cease to shock”, wrote Brian Boyd in the introduction to his two-volume biography about Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov.

Fourteen years ago, when he spoke to Jeffrey Epstein about funding to write a book about the novel, the billionaire financier’s child sex abuse conviction “was not well known at all,” he says.

“If I’d known he’d been convicted, the last thing I would ever have done would be to suggest a book on Lolita,” Boyd tells RNZ’s Nights.

The Auckland University lecturer finds it “appalling” that his name appears in the US government’s latest dump of files related to the deceased paedophile.

“I really didn’t think that my name would emerge in the Epstein files. I thought I was too much of a minnow to feature against all the big names that are there.”

RNZ