Thank you all for your attention to my question. Having read Hans article, it became obvious to me that you were thinking subtle colour shifts whereas what I was experiencing were what I call dramatic, to the point where a red object was looking like a pink one.
This morning (in Australia) I set about a careful redocumentation of the problem and another attempt to upload photos for you all to see. I photographed distinctly red objects around the house in JPEG and Nikon raw, and imported them into DxO Pro 9, Nikon Capture NX-D, and to Lightroom. The first two programs treated both raw and jpeg as I would have expected, subtle colour shifts between each program and between raw and jpeg in both. But neither program rendered any shot of a red object on my monitor anything but a blend of red. I then imported the same originals to Lightroom. On the jpegs, so far so good, but the raw image of a red felt object rendered it distinctly a pink felt object. Prompted by reading Hans's colour profile article I began looking through Lightroom's settings and eventually in the develop module, the camera calibration, which was correctly set to "2012" but also to "adobe standard". The nub of the problem ! On changing that to camera neutral or any of the others, the pink felt suddenly turned red again.
So the issue which has plagued me for months if not years and which I had not noticed as significant except for red objects is resolved.
The question now is whether Lightroom will hold that setting in all the raw images I import. Hopefully yes, but if anyone has a suggestion about that I would be grateful.
In the meantime, I now know what to do to fix it.
Again thank you for your valuable responses (and to Hans for how to get very serious about this - I have bookmarked his article.
