Race Rats, or A Brief History of Slavery

Last month I was 75, and it seems I am still growing up. This may be wishful thinking, but it is motivated by the current exhibition of Vermeer and his contemporaries. As a young man I found the subject matter of Dutch burghers and their equally Dutch cows unexciting when compared with the glories of the Cisalpine Renaissance. I never could get the message from the tonsillitis languages Dutch, Swiss-German and Yiddish, and so I arrogantly ignored their artists. I was wrong, and over the last decade I have traveled to the big Vermeer exhibition at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the de Hooch show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and now a small selection of Vermeers and the Delft School at the National Gallery. Even Proust could leave the Salons of the Guermantes to look at the famous view of Delft. I may now have reached an age of quietude in tune with the silence of those Dutch interiors.

London has also been privileged to host an exhibition of two collections from Baltimore: the Walters Art Gallery, and the pictures selected by Gertrude Stein for the two sisters Etta and Claribel Cone, housed in the Baltimore Museum of Art. Baltimore is a conservative, well-mannered city, and its collectors would have felt at home centuries earlier in the Netherlands. As a counterblast, the Courtauld Institute is showing Lea Fauvea, Matisse, Vlaminck and Derain in the rooms adjoining its own intoxicating collection of postimpressionists.

In case all these shows were too civilized I hopped on a bus and saw the splash of gold and precious stones in the old Indian jewelry show at the British Museum. This is the collection of the ruler of Kuwait, partly recovered after being looted by the soldiery of Saddam Hussein, and it is a long, long way from 17th-century Delft. The historian Simon Schama wrote a wonderful book about Holland's golden age, The Embarrassment of Riches. The title would have fitted these Mughal baubles better. In the adjoining Egyptian Galleries is an exhibition pertaining to the image of Cleopatra. Might history really have been different if her nose had been longer? Edith Wharton wrote some wonderful lines in praise of aristocracy's prominent proboscises, regretting that in later decadent ages, noses no longer resemble the prow of a proud ship, but only seem fit to harbor the common cold.

The high points in the theater during recent months have really been transatlantic imports. Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things was produced by the always enterprising Almeida Theatre. The author introduces you to two couples in Hicksville, and, as is his forte, lulls the audience into a feeling of apple-pie normalcy before kicking it brutally in the solar plexus. As a bonus you are also given a more profound and funnier vision of the modern art world than was seen in the play Art, which has filled theaters in many cities. The Donmar revived Sam Shepard's Lie of the Mind, and the Young Vic gave us the same author's Action. In each of them Shepard kicks you in the solar plexus as the curtain rises and never stops doing so.

David Margulies gives you a slight respite in Dinner with Friends by introducing you to well-mannered East Coast WASPs (A.R. Gurney territory), but they all writhe in matrimonial agonies. Our homegrown playwrights are also very good in this s&m school of drama. Harold Pinter's Mountain Language and his Ashes to Ashes were revived at the Royal Court as a double bill, giving us almost 90 minutes of splendid theater for our money. Some years ago in New York I was charged $45 Off-Broadway for just 48 minutes of the second of these plays, and it was still the best value in town. The Royal Court also gave us Sarah Kane's duo Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, and the titles give you fair warning of what to expect onstage, and sadly also of what led this promising author to her suicide. Patrick Marber, the brilliant new playwright who gave us Closer and Dealer's Choice this season, opened with Howard Katz at the National. It was very funny, very painful, very Jewish, so it is sure to reach New York, and I will not spoil the story. The last import for s&m patrons was from Africa, and the rich gave you fair warning. Big Dada: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin Dada. I cry for that tragic, beautiful continent.

The most theatrically dramatic spectacles can be found in the fresh air. I don't just mean opera performances at Glyndebourne, but sports events, which, like the plays I have just described, have an unexpected subliminal s&m symbolism. Cricket, for instance, where you see descendants of the race that once conquered a quarter of the globe being beaten by visitors from their former colonies: Australians, Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians. The most beautiful cricket ground in England is of course the one created by Sir Paul Getty on his Wormsley estate. Thanks to my daughter I get invited to witness the polo at Cowdray Park, where her husband captains his own team. But here also I get confused by all the giants of industry and of banking hiring Hispanic cowboys to beat them up. Don't cry for them, Argentina.