The irony is that de Botton is one of the few writers who could afford never to work. His father left a huge trust fund (well over £200m) that he could tap if he ever needed to, but he prefers to live by his writing. His father, Gilbert de Botton, was a Jewish banker, born...
Alain de Botton explores how we can cope with a variety of forms of mental pain and illness, from the mild to the severe. It considers how and why we might become ill; how we can explain things to friends, family and colleagues; how we can find our ways towards recovery; and how we...
De Botton starts with a dithyramb to the pleasures of a west London suburban house, his own, one suspects. It is all about the accidental pleasures of sunlight and silence, the associations of family life and the recollections of those who might have lived in the house before; not about th...
Alain de Botton wrote three novels before writing a book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, which became a bestseller and changed his life. He has since penned several books––all of them international hits. They are both confessional and essayistic. These topics range from literature to trave...
By ALAIN de BOTTONMAY 28, 2016 IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try ...
Mr. de Botton’s book could have been accurately titled “Living for the Moment the Marcel Proust Way.” Seen in this light, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is a very unusual self-help book. As Mr. de Botton explains, Marcel Proust’s family was into self-help long before there wa...
When, in AD 65, Seneca was ordered to kill himself by the crazed Emperor Nero, his wife and family collapsed in tears, but Seneca had learnt to follow the charriot of life with resignation. As he calmly took the knife to his veins, he remarked – in a sentence we may be wise to ...
Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small...
`Oh, god! Alain de Botton! Do you know how rich his family is?! His dad owned Switzerland!" This, or something very similar, is what almost every fellow scribbler exclaims when this "popular" philosopher's name is mentioned. Which is rather frequently, because Mr de Botton, damn him, ...
the eighteenth century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage – just as...