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It makes good economic sense.There are other, more complicated, reasons. Since 1989, when the Chancellor repealed the rule that allowed two people to claim tax relief on the same mortgage, the advantages of a joint mortgage have been outweighed by the difficulties created when one person wants to move on. Young couples find themselves stranded in a flat they can’t sell, in a relationship that has cooled from ardour to at best tolerance, at worst, hostility.Rather than risk this, people now prefer to buy singly, perhaps taking a lodger to help with the mortgage payments. “Not your fault.”Inside the store, other fresh-faced young men were fingering the opulent pile of Armani overcoats, reduced to £289 or £350 from £495. “But you’ve got two coats already!” I heard a young woman object.

And there is no outside.So the message – again the nostrils flare – of the book is that art promises everything and changes nothing. It offers perfect, transcendent visions that turn out to be no more than unusually elaborate bars.And now the good news: Lolita, after 40 years, is beyond criticism or desecration. If he comes back, I’ll be turfed out.”I’m sorry,” I said futilely.He smiled. In the week when my son is moving to live by himself in a flat he has bought in east London, this fact strikes home to the maternal heart. It would seem to prove, yet again, the polarisation of our society into the haves and have-nots. Every day I pass young men crouching in boxes and doorways, bundled up in a filthy duvet or blanket against the freezing weather. I spoke to one the other day – a polite, fresh-faced youth who can’t have been more than 17 – and asked if his “pitch” (a cramped space next door to the modish luxury of Emporio Armani on Knightsbridge) was a good one.
“Not bad,” he said, “it’s really my mate’s, but he’s been away over Christmas.

Doubtless the movie will be a glossy travesty, but it will pass in less than nine and a half weeks. The book will live as long as there are readers and that, as Humbert, an artist to the last, says, “is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita”.. As the critic Lionel Trilling said: “No lover has thought of his beloved with so much tenderness, no woman has been so charmingly evoked, in such grace and delicacy, as Lolita; it is one of the few examples of rapture in modern writing …” Humbert is caged by his own genius, a genius that creates an order, beauty a nd perfection that, inside the cage, cannot exist except in his imagination and his passion. The first recognisable picture the animal produced was of the bars of its cage. And this is all that Humbert’s genius and his peerless prose ever achieve. With fabulous invention and in crystalline detail, he draws the bars of his cage.Humbert is caged by his forbidden obsession, by the brutal, selfish corruption of his own personality and, most cruelly, by his own gift for savouring and elucidating his passion.