In her new film, The Bookshop, Emily Mortimer plays the owner of a bookshop in 1959 who scandalises her small Suffolk town by selling copies of a controversial new novel called Lolita. How quaint, you think. How far we’ve come since then. Or have we? Mortimer is not so sure. “Lolita would have a hard time being published today,” she says, sipping a cappuccino in the drawing room of a hotel in central London. “And there’s something wrong about that.”
She’s talking about the climate surrounding the #MeToo movement, whose achievements she relishes, but which she fears has made us lose some of our boldness when it comes to risky material.
“It’s a weird moment that’s both really exciting and wonderful, and