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...
Of course, De Botton doesn’t claim to hold all the answers; as in previous books, he turns to old masters of art and literature for wisdom and guidance: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Hopper and Van Gogh, among others. He quotes Flaubert on his notorious (and hilarious) contempt for France, and...
De Botton ends his first section saying, more or less, that the best way for us to stop letting this make us unhappy is to “bare the device”: to acknowledge and understand this drive. He doesn’t really aim to carry an argument, though. Rather, he uses the loose theme of his titl...
The text is littered with historic examples and appropriate quotes. They are generally well-chosen -- interesting enough -- but leave one with the sense that de Botton is cobbling together his argument from what others have said and noted before, rather than constructing or offering anything new...
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...
De Botton takes both a camera and a sketchbook, it seems, but he quotes Ruskin on the value of drawing as a way of seeing places, however primitive your technique, and says that he began to appreciate the identity of oak trees after spending an hour drawing one in the Langdale Valley ...
As soon as you have something, or love it, you begin to fear its loss, therefore status anxiety is as powerful a force as status desire. The fear of disgrace and disrespect, but even more of being ignored, is a powerful motivator in our actions, de Botton argues. He quotes one philoso...