The School of Life Press strana 2 z 2

It is a daily undertaking - a morning shot of coffee, an absentminded sandwich at your desk, a hastily assembled dinner with the remnants from the fridge... With its every day ubiquity we can make the mistake of assuming that food is of little importance, or simply fuel to see us through the day. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves? What we eat and how we eat it has a significant impact on our psychological well-being. In recent times, our society has been eager to recruit food to the project of physical health, but we've not always paid so much attention to how cooking and eating can assist us with our emotional health. With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows how ingredients and dishes can be supporters of certain ideas, emotions and states of mind that best help us confront the challenges of existence. In each recipe we discover of the ways in which food can store, memorialise and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.

Everyone tells kids that art matters - but the truth is that very often it's hard to know why it really does. Museum visits can feel like a chore as does having to learn the names of the big artists we're all meant to love (but perhaps don't quite in the way we're supposed to). This is a huge pity because - grasped the right way - art has a deep capacity to improve our lives and offer us a sense of joy and mental well-being. Here is a guide to art for children with a difference: in a tone that's kindly, informative, unstuffy and at times rightly irreverent, this book explains how art can fit into our lives. We learn where the impulse to make art comes from, what art to look at in certain moods, how to go around a museum without getting bored and why - without even realising it - we all become experts in art by decorating our first bedrooms. This is an innovative guide to the importance of art, produced in a way that will enchant children and, along the way, teach their favourite adults one or two vital things as well.

We don't think we hate cheap things, of course, but we rather behave as if we do, in the sense that we rarely properly appreciate what is always around us and doesn't appear to cost very much, for example, the night sky, pencils, fried eggs, zips and the holding of hands. This volume explores the way we can easily grow disenchanted with our immediate circumstances and pine for what is exotic, costly and out of reach - and it gently returns us to ourselves, full of new found wonder and gratitude. Combining literature, economics and sheer good sense, Why We Hate Cheap Things reawakens us to the world immediately around us and to the latent beauty and interest of what we have.

Many of us are quiet geniuses at the art of procrastination. We tend to feel so guilty about everything we haven't done yet (and the hours frittered away as though we were immortal), we never get around to reflecting on why we delay and how we might do so less o en. It seems as if we have procrastinated too much to deserve a new start. Far from it. As this book shows, procrastination isn't a weird affliction we alone have been cursed with: it's a fascinating and solvable design-flaw of the human animal. The goal is not to remove procrastination altogether (it sometime has things to teach us), but to understand its roots and plot a nimble path around it. This is a book about managing our procrastination, getting the most out of our afternoons on the sofa and then sometimes daring to get on with the most important tasks in our lives.