Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which now seems almost anodyne, was the subject of a criminal prosecution in 1960, but Lolita, which came out the previous year and still has the power to shock, was not. Why? Actor Emily Mortimer, whose father was a barrister who defended more than one client in obscenity trials, uses what she learned from him (“First, it’s very funny. My dad always said you could get away with anything in court as long as you made people laugh”) and others to explain the power of Nabokov’s achievement. – The New York Times
