Writers don’t care about such a shallow, inconsequential thing as fashion, do they? They spend all their time holed up in defiantly unglamorous dark rooms that are littered with notes and cuttings, stubbed-out cigarettes and empty wine bottles. It is such detritus, not designer knitwear and suede jackets, that constitutes the physical effluvia of their overflowing genius. To borrow a phrase from Mr Roald Dahl: they choose books, not looks.

“I’ve just lost my job and I did nothing wrong.” I could hear the outrage in Keith’s voice as he hovered beside the armchair he was too agitated to sit in. “My boss is such a jerk,” he told me. “He just didn’t try to understand what an asset I am to the business. He even said I had an attitude problem. Me, of all people!” Keith had been a senior asset manager at an international bank for nearly five years. His anger was so powerful it swamped his sadness, fear and shame. Losing our job is hard because it makes us face difficult questions. Will I get another job? Can I pay the bills? What will my friends think? How will I fill my time? Was it my fault? In her book Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success, psychologist Dr Carol Dweck offers a helpful model to overcome setbacks such as losing our job, by showing us how we can grow through adversity. We do this, Dr Dweck says, by developing a flexible mindset. Instead of seeing problems as, well, problems, we should reframe them as chances. And, by acknowledging the part we played in them, we can then behave differently if or when a similar situation arises again.

When I was little, my mother brought one of Japanese artist Mr Yoshitomo Nara’s works home with her. An oversized ashtray, it’s delicately lacquered with a little girl wearing a yellow smock – her eyes fixed in a glare and nostrils flaring – despondently smoking a cigarette, with the words “Too Young To Die” painted in a Comic Sans-like scribble on the rim. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Did a precocious child make it? Why was its subject so angry? Was it a piece of anti-tobacco propaganda? And, if it was used for its intended function, as my mother did, why would she, a smoker, want a ceramic reminder of her vice’s lethality? I just didn’t get it. Years later, now armed with a master’s degree in art history, I still don’t. Not fully, anyway. Mr Nara’s work is deliberately ambiguous, and all the better for it. Hidden under a veneer of cartoonish simplicity, his now-iconic big-headed “girls” (Mr Nara has said he doesn’t consciously prescribe a gender to his subjects) are fascinating in their complexity. But a new book by Ms Yeewan Koon, chair of the fine arts department at Hong Kong university, and published by Phaidon, is the first major attempt to unpack the artist’s world.

As London’s second-generation immigrant chefs start to come into their own, it’s only natural that they want to create food that is much a personal expression as it is the continuation of the story of a national cuisine. But how to satisfy the demands and expectations of an audience unfamiliar with the cuisine and the expectations of another whose perception of the “authentic” is frozen in time? Food writer Mr Jonathan Nunn sits down with the chefs behind three of London’s most exciting new restaurants to find out how they’re doing just that.

Writers don’t care about such a shallow, inconsequential thing as fashion, do they? They spend all their time holed up in defiantly unglamorous dark rooms that are littered with notes and cuttings, stubbed-out cigarettes and empty wine bottles. It is such detritus, not designer knitwear and suede jackets, that constitutes the physical effluvia of their overflowing genius. To borrow a phrase from Mr Roald Dahl: they choose books, not looks.

“I’ve just lost my job and I did nothing wrong.” I could hear the outrage in Keith’s voice as he hovered beside the armchair he was too agitated to sit in. “My boss is such a jerk,” he told me. “He just didn’t try to understand what an asset I am to the business. He even said I had an attitude problem. Me, of all people!” Keith had been a senior asset manager at an international bank for nearly five years. His anger was so powerful it swamped his sadness, fear and shame. Losing our job is hard because it makes us face difficult questions. Will I get another job? Can I pay the bills? What will my friends think? How will I fill my time? Was it my fault? In her book Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success, psychologist Dr Carol Dweck offers a helpful model to overcome setbacks such as losing our job, by showing us how we can grow through adversity. We do this, Dr Dweck says, by developing a flexible mindset. Instead of seeing problems as, well, problems, we should reframe them as chances. And, by acknowledging the part we played in them, we can then behave differently if or when a similar situation arises again.