In Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006, with its stark cubes and fretwork of painted crosswalks, the workaday scene seems to be held in place by the guy-wires of some enigmatic order.
But foot-scrapers, ornamental fretwork and wrought iron pipe are out of fashion and Reading has lost $4,000.
While this normal fretwork of the politicians went on, the general himself calmly busied himself with the here and now.
Evelyn Waugh in New Statesman In Brideshead Revisited, the Chinese drawing room at Brides head Castle (a house built in the 1670s, Evelyn Waugh wrote) is a 1750s addition, "adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and Chippendale fretwork".