As novelist, Nabokov fits his own description of the role as a combination of teacher, story-teller and enchanter, and [Lectures on Literature] proves that he was all of these as lecturer too. But the feeling persists that the altered sentences of Mansfield Park, the sketches of Gregor Samsa's flat, the notes on precisely what kind of insect he was … belong not in a book but in the archives. Nabokov's wit and insight are often dazzling but despite his exhaustive—and exhausting—search for details to caress, he has little inclination to animadvert except where the chance of a game-within-the-game is sighted. Beneath the glitter he is an old-fashioned critic: 'Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.'

Many of these lectures … are half-composed of passages from the work under discussion, as if the lecturer were addressing an audience which...