Armageddon doesn’t come hotter than this. Hard on the heels of Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential – remember the bit when the fish chef gives the bride a quickie over the trash-bin?) comes Bill Buford, literary lion turned kitchen skivvy in one of Manhattan’s big-name restaurants, author of this compulsively readable addition to the literature of culinary bad boys. It gets to you, the heat. And if you can’t stand it – well, here’s one literary editor who’s man enough to take it.

Which goes to show that, for intellectual folk, testosterone talks louder than words. For Buford the attraction of cheffing is not just the sexiness of making raw materials taste good – the ‘mouthy stuff’ which makes certain TV chefs so watchable – but the high you get from belonging to