Article note: It's such a good (fictional) example.
It's also such a classic "almost no one checked the references, and the person who propagated it misunderstood what they read." scenario.
Despite my manly looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness.
— Humbert Humbert, from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”