"In any case, it is a matter of indifference to me whether VN (or anyone else, for that matter) fantasizes about sex with underage girls, so long as he stops short of putting his fantasies into action..."--Jim Twiggs
JT seems to make some contradictory statements in his comments on the MacLean article.  The statement quoted above is easy enough to agree with; indeed, the act of writing a novel such as Lolita requires imagining such fantasies.  However, he goes on to almost endorse MacLean's assumptions about VN's supposed "unseemly urges" in comments such as "...passion for sex, much of it with underage girls, runs throughout VN's work,"  and this I don't agree with.  JT cites the poem Lilith (originally written by VN in Russian in 1928) as support for his statements, even though VN himself, in the author's notes to Poems and Problems, offers that  "Intelligent readers will abstain from examining this impersonal fantasy for any links with my later fiction," and that the poem was written "...to amuse a friend." There is a huge difference between artistic fantasy on the one hand, and assuming a likelihood that someone capable of a Lolita is somehow in the same league as an incurable pedophile who must use "stuffed-shirtedness"  as a "firewall" against unseemly urges! Again, such statements put MacLean on the same intellectual level as H. S. Thompson and P. J. O'Rourke, who found it logical that since VN wrote about sordid subjects, he must have engaged in sordid behavior (using a supposed Sun Valley sighting of VN with an 11-year-old girl as "evidence").  I disagree with any such suppositions about VN's urges and passions.