How to be top: two new books promise the self-improvement Holy Grail

People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to be Topp. 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. No one wants to be a Fotherington-Thomas – a wet. Or a schlub, a has-been or a never-was. It’s just a shame, then, that most of the books which promise to tell us how to be top are absolute garbage.

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.