‘Exactly. It originates in . . . well, in the Middle East, in fact, and then you see it in English architecture from about the fourteenth century onwards. It’s like Hogarth’s line of beauty,’ Nick said, with a mounting sense of fatuity, ‘except that there are two of them, of course . . . I suppose the line of beauty’s a sort of animating principle, isn’t it . . .’ He looked around and swooped his hand suggestively in the air. It wasn’t perhaps the animating principle here.
