When scandal breaks, and cameramen set up on the front lawn, the drawing room becomes a kind of command center. In Alan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker Prize winning novel, “The Line of Beauty” (2004), the hero Nick Guest has been living, somewhat frivolously, as a graduate student houseguest in the home of a Tory MP. When the MP gets into serious trouble, his aristocratic brother-in-law, a lord, starts giving orders. “A structure of command, long laid away in velvet, had been rapidly assembled.” Nick finds the resumption of feudal authority electrifying.