You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

10th of January. After supper at the National Portrait Gallery restaurant, we go next door to the National Gallery.

Still, after all these years,

a great luxury to be able to go in after hours. Walking through the galleries with the light springing on as we pass through each door, it's always a temptation to turn aside and look at old

favourites, but we press on to the basement of the Sainsbury Wing and the late

Rembrandt show. Oddly arranged in that there are half a dozen of the great self-portraits at the

start, which I somehow feel should be the climax of the show, but better for me as by the time we do

get round this quite substantial exhibition, I'm exhausted.

As always with Rembrandt, feel almost arraigned by the self-portraits and put on the spot.

And, he seems to be saying, so, the self-disgust is there and the sadness, but in a very contemporary way he's a

celebrity, resenting being looked at while at the same time, and like any other celebrity,

having put himself in the way of it in the first place. Bridget goes around pretty much at my pace.

Rupert has all was slower and taking more in, noting the tears brimming in Lucrezia's

eyes, for instance, and how she's had to half-slip herself out of her heavily brocaded dress

the more easily to stab herself.

He marvels at the oath of the Bataviyi, which, it not having much color, doesn't touch me

in the same way, though I wish I had some of the smaller dry points, Christ's preaching,

for instance, if only to examine the details, a child playing on the floor beneath Christ's

feet, some of his heroes transfixed, others just bored. But apart from marbling at Rembrandt's

technical skill, my appreciation doesn't get much beyond that people were the same then as they are now, level.

I can see how touching the Jewish bride is, while always thinking it looks awkwardly posed.

Look, I am permitted to touch her breast. And the moist sadness of Bathsheba is wonderful,

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