The man who enters the room is bespectacled, refined, delicately built - a white-haired Buster Keaton with a sarf London accent.
An illustration from Khwāju Kermānī's Mas̄navī (1430 40; British Museum) shows a remarkable variety of blues and greens and demonstrates the delicately refined brushwork for which the Herāt school is famous.
His involved, delicately refined instrumental writing — performed here by the pianist Kathleen Supové and the violinist Courtney Orlando, in some cases with computer tracks — is offset by his arch, cabaret-tinged vocal style and the quirkiness of his texts.
There's the fine art of the fringe poster, an image delicately refined to catch the eye of passing trade (or just splattered on to every railing in the new town, if your promoter has pockets deep enough).
It embraces, on the one hand, the finest of fine furniture and the most delicately refined of decorative arts (ceramics, rugs, silver), and, on the other, such objects of popular culture as toys, homemade utilitarian objects like fanciful weather vanes and the goofiest kinds of folk art.
(Its store in Mayfair is worth a visit in its own right). When tea was served it was hard not to notice the delicately refined teaspoon and the way it felt between your fingers.
Potter & Moore Cane Sugar Body Exfoliator 150g, £25, potterandmoore.com Softly textured sugary scrub, delicately fragrant, very refined.
They have spent nearly half a century refining the art and technique of casting huge chunks of delicately colored glass.
At Wednesday's matinee this was danced by Melissa Hamilton, delicately pretty, if tentative, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, and Sergei Polunin, a beautifully refined dancer who didn't look as if this were his favorite role.
