I was just thinking this evening, as I walked along the Ring before coming here, how impressive it was. Exceptionally well laid out with a generosity of scale that you won’t find in –’‘You like the Ring?’ Hoff said, incredulous.‘Emphatically. I think it’s –’‘You do realize these are new buildings, only a few decades old, if that?’‘I have read my guidebook carefully –’Hoff actually prodded him on the arm with a finger, his eyebrows circumflexing in a strange anguished frown.‘I abominate the Ring,’ Hoff said, a little tremor in his voice. ‘The Ring is a grotesque bourgeois sham. It’s an offence to the eye, to one’s sense of what is right, one’s most basic values. I close my eyes when I see the Ring. New buildings masquerading as something ancient and venerable. Shameful. We Viennese artists live in a permanent sense of shame.’ He poked him again in the arm as if to add emphasis and walked away.‘Good god . . . Sorry about that,’ Lysander said to Hettie.
