You have to admire the sheer audacity – the low cheek, really – of a book with the title The Real Work, which is in fact a rework, a cut-and-paste of previous magazine articles, dressed up to look like a big ideas book. A staff writer for the New Yorker, he is supremely confident, ever-so-slightly irritating, hard to love but impossible not to like. There are only drops and dribbles – so let us be grateful for the faintest trickles from on high.Īdam Gopnik is the Ted Lasso of glossy magazine writing. In fairness, both books contain a few drops of invigorating liquor for those of us desperate for succour and insight – which is probably as good as it gets, because there is no Holy Grail. Two new books, by two very different people on a similar theme, promise the usual self-improvement Holy Grail: drink the Kool-Aid from this cup and you too can be creative and imaginative in abundance. It’s just a shame, then, that most of the books which promise to tell us how to be top are absolute garbage. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. I would love to wake up fizzing with ideas, overflowing with insights and determined beyond all reasonable determination to share my extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, my art, with the world. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient.

The sheer audacity