Which makes the excitement when it eventually comes all the greater. There, too, it took us time to catch on, though now we are so enthralled by our new-found libertinage we can't stop talking about it. As with sex our exuberance at the final arrival on our shores of what passes for futuristic art is merely a measure of the fustiness and inhibitions that went before. And like sex, to listen to our populist patricians expiring in praise of contemporary art you would have thought that no one had ever done it before. As for writing, not a few of our allegedly literary works are inferior to the best popular authors, such as Elmore Leonard or George V Higgins.
Nations change slowly, their illusions even slower.
Where once we ruled militarily and economically, now we rule culturally - effortlessly as always and with a languid, ironic hand. Our Great Pretenders in the arts are reactionaries in disguise, their impossible dream to combine Victorian grandeur with the spirit of the sixties. Already the young are tiring of the frenzied enthusiasms characteristic of the tremulously ageing. In that sense, the future is auspicious. They have more serenity and more energy.