Humbert has always been on trial from page one; his offenses have not changed. The jury has. Familiarity has bred alarm: the book feels, in 2021, more potent, more pernicious, less of a riotous highball and more of a ruinous opioid.

The social investigator Charles Booth thought they were ‘lenient judges of the frailties that are not sins, and of the disorder that is not crime’.