Find

 My favourite Lichfield charity bookshop has gifted me many great finds – but today's was the best, and most unexpected, yet: Nabokov's Blues by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates. I'm not sure this was even published in England, and heaven knows how it found its way to Lichfield and to a charity bookshop, but I know from the flyleaf that it was once owned by one Anne D. Wilson, whom I thank for disposing of it so judiciously. 
  Nabokov's Blues tells the story of 'The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius', focusing on Nabokov's ground-breaking work on those fascinating and beautiful butterflies known as the Blues. As well as being a butterfly lover (as is evident from his fiction and memoirs), Nabokov was a serious lepidopterist – or rather lepidopterologist, which is even more serious and scientific. His work on the Blues included a radical new classification which at the time was highly controversial, but was found many years later to be soundly based and led to new insights into the global movement of species and the threats to their survival. Dmitri Nabokov,  no less, describes Nabokov's Blues as a book 'both eerily evocative and stunningly new, that makes delectable reading without patronising the reader'. I'm looking forward to reading this one, perhaps in the winter when the butterflies are no longer flying.