“Strangely, it can take enormous confidence to trust your own palate, follow your own instincts.” When I first read these words in How to Eat by Nigella Lawson 20 years ago, it felt like angel trumpets going off in my head. I was in my mid-20s, pregnant and surfacing from nearly a decade of dieting and disordered eating. This idea that I could trust myself to decide what to eat appeared both strange and liberating. Since I was a child, I had been an obsessive reader of cookbooks but had never encountered a voice like Nigella’s before. Unlike Raymond Blanc or Richard Olney (author of The French Menu Cookbook), she wasn’t making me feel I ought to pay homage to authentic French food traditions. Nor was she implying – as plenty of earlier recipe writers had done – that it was my duty as a woman to master a certain number of dishes, and serve them on a certain kind of crockery. “Never worry about what your guests will think of you,” she wrote, reassuringly. All she asked of her readers was to discover what we loved to eat, and then learn how to cook it, assuming it wasn’t too “fiddly”. In contrast to dozens of male chefs, she felt no urge to awe us with her genius or her knife skills. As she announced: “I have nothing to declare but my greed.”
For those of us who love How to Eat above all other food books, what it offered was that original voice, which worked its way into your head and made you feel braver in the kitchen. It was the voice of a woman who did not feel the need to hide or disguise her own appetites, as so many of us are taught to do. Americans had already known some of that boldness about food from the late MFK Fisher, author of Serve It Forth (1937) and Consider the Oyster (1941), who paraded her joy in eating to please only herself, but in Britain, the freedom of Nigella’s voice felt very new. She did not tell us – as Elizabeth David did – the correct way to do something, but the way that happened to give her the most pleasure for the least amount of hassle. In her recipe for ratatouille, she departs from “Mrs David’s” firmness about pre-salting and draining the aubergines, noting pointedly that “missing out this stage hasn’t resulted in a hopelessly soggy mess”.
Bookselling has been relentlessly romanticised, most often by Hollywood: in truth, it is further away from You’ve Got Mail (Tom Hanks’s snazzy shop Fox Books would have been toppled by the internet) and much closer to that moment in Notting Hill when Hugh Grant catches Dylan Moran ferreting away a book in his pants. This actually happened at a bookshop I worked in: a man was caught packing his trousers with true crime and was asked (amazingly politely) to hand them over to a long-suffering colleague (they went promptly back on the shelf).
It’s going to be tough to replace 83 years’ worth of grime.
As the fishmongers of Tokyo’s famed wholesale seafood market, Tsukiji, opened for their final day at their familiar site on Saturday, they and their customers lamented the end of an era of grunge.
“Dirty is best,” said Yoshitaka Moria, 38, an owner of a fish shop in the Ota ward of Tokyo, who regularly shops for seafood at Tsukiji and was buying an assortment of tuna, sea bream, oysters and amberjack on Saturday morning. “It makes this place so vibrant. I know that the fishmongers are working too hard to clean up.”
The Incendiaries is a book of careful feints – the emphases in the story never fall where you expect, but Kwon is always in total control. She writes with aphoristic concision and a disciplined sense of what to leave out. Wisely, many of the details of Jejah and Phoebe’s radicalisation are left to the reader’s imagination, though what glimpses we are afforded are grimly amusing, such as when Leal enjoins his followers to dig a giant hole in the backyard and then fill it back in again, because “nothing energises like humiliation”. By anchoring the narrative to Will, the disillusioned ex-believer, Kwon can write with a forensic but sceptical eye about the consolations of devotional ferocity – about the unburdened happiness Roger Janney believes he sees in the assembled faces of The Moonies gathered in Yankee Stadium in Mao II – without ever losing the secular reader. The Incendiaries is a startlingly assured book by an important new writer.
No philosophy, he argues in conclusion, can escape the peculiarities of its own place; even global philosophy must come from somewhere. The question is not where you’re from, but where you’re heading. In our embattled age, Baggini’s self-awareness, acuity and willingness to listen and learn point valuably away from parochial myopia and towards productive dialogue.
The overall aim of the firm should be couched in modest terms. Too many businesses talk about “changing the world” and becoming a “disrupter”. Such aims are far too grandiose and put everyone under too much pressure. As a manager, if you set out to do a good job for your customers, and to treat your employees fairly, things will probably turn out fine.
In short, the book aims to persuade managers to take their “mission” less seriously and to take their employees more so. Furthermore, executives should stop equating the work ethic with the practice of working long hours. Work should not be frantic. A calm company can be good for employees and very profitable as well.