In a message dated 29/11/2005 18:05:12 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@cox.net writes:

Foster mentions Nabokov 's praise of Peter Lubin for "his absolutely dazzling scholarship" in the discovery of these three words in Eliot's Four Quartets

Is this meant unironically? If VN said this, he must have meant it as a joke. Anyone who knew Four Quartets tolerably well would instantly recognise the allusion, as I -- a 22-year-old mathematics student at the time -- did on first reading Pale Fire when it came out in 1962.

Anthony Stadlen