How to Get on With Your Colleagues
An essential guide to navigating the complexities of professional relationships. Our colleagues can be the sources of our greatest joys and triumphs: they compensate for our weaknesses, enlarge our strengths and aggregate our energies. However, wo...
Varieties of Melancholy
This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn't depression or anger or bitterness, it's a serene, accepting, gentle, wise and kindly response to the difficulties and occasional miser...
Affairs
Our societies are remarkably confident on the matter: affairs are terrible things and only fools, monsters and knaves would ever be involved in them. Those who are their victims deserve unending sympathy and access to a good lawyer. This stance ma...
Screen-Free Fun
Whether we're big or small, it can be hard to get away from our screens. Most children spend between five and seven hours a day looking at some form of screen - and most grown-ups spend twice as much time. Screens promise endless entertainment, bu...
An Emotional Menagerie: Feelings from A to Z
An Emotional Menagerie
How to Find the Right Words
Life constantly requires us to give other people some hugely awkward messages: that we don't love them anymore; that we do love them (though we're not meant to); that they smell a bit; that they're fired; that we're furious with them (though we ad...
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
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. Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We know that perfecti...
What is Psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is one of the most valuable inventions of the last hundred years, with an exceptional power to raise our levels of emotional well-being, improve our relationships, redeem the atmosphere in our families and assist us in mining our pro...
What Is Culture For?
Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture. Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for? This book proposes...
Heartbreak
Almost no one gets through life without, at some point, having their heart broken. Advice at such a dark moment tends to focus on letting time do the healing. But there is also a vital role for understanding and perspective. We sometimes make our ...
Dating
Dating might seem a trivial and relatively inconsequential part of love, but it is in fact key to getting into the kind of relationship that can last and help us flourish. The process we call dating sits on top of some of the largest themes of lov...
Great Thinkers
The Great Thinkers is a collection of some of the most important ideas of Eastern and Western culture - drawn from the works of those philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, artists and novelists whom we believe have the most to offer to ...
Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
Being a parent can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is also - intermittently - the cause of some of our deepest sorrows. It is likely that we will spend at least some of the time in despair and confusion, wondering whether it really ...
How to Find Love
Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make. The cost of repeated failure is immense. And yet we are often so alone with the search. Partners used to be found for us by parents and society. Now we are...
How to Survive the Modern World
A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing. The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine and transport. But it can ...
The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners
A guide to confronting modern social situations with confidence and grace.
Happy, Healthy Minds
An essential guide to help children become more aware of their emotional needs. This book examines a range of everyday topics that might give children's minds difficulties, for example: when parents don't seem to understand us; when we fall out wi...
Mind & Body
The modern world can present the body as a machine that just needs to be regularly exercised. However, it is a remarkably sensitive organ in which a lot of our pain and hope is stored and that we need to interpret and handle with subtlety. This im...
Anxiety
A guide to our anxious minds; offering a route to calm, self-compassion and mental well-being. Far more than we tend to realise, we're all - in private - deeply anxious. There is so much that worries us across our days and nights: whether our hope...
Replacement for Religion
Many of us find ourselves in the odd situation of not believing in religion - but nevertheless being interested in it, moved by it and sympathetic to some of its aims. We may enjoy religious art and architecture, music and community, and even some...
Simpler Life
Exploring ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less. The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us lon...
How to Overcome Your Childhood
When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But o...
How to Travel
An original and comprehensive look at what it is we seek when we set off on an adventure abroad - and at how we can travel better, so that our experiences overseas become truly transformative and memorable. Going travelling is one of the few thing...
Self-Knowledge
In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: 'Know yourself'. Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who w...
Big Ideas for Curious Minds
Children are, in many ways, born philosophers. Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all. Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions ...
More Exciting Life
One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives cou...
What They Forgot to Teach You at School
We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of f...
On Confidence
The difference between success and failure often hangs on a fascinatingly small and elusive concept that our standard education system never touches: confidence. This is a guidebook to what confidence consists of, why we lack it - and how we can a...
Emotionally Intelligent Office
Stress and mental ill health currently costs the UK economy upwards of £30 billion a year. Modern businesses continue to place huge emphasis on technical training, yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of organisations has nothing to...
The School Of Life
This is a book about everything you were never taught at school. It's about how to understand your emotions, find and sustain love, succeed in your career, fail well and overcome shame and guilt. It's also about letting go of the myth of a perfect life in order to achieve genuine emotional maturity. Written in a hugely accessible, warm and humane style, The School of Life is the ultimate guide to the emotionally fulfilled lives we all long for - and deserve. This book brings together ten years of essential and transformative research on emotional intelligence, with practical topics including: - how to understand yourself - how to master the dilemmas of relationships - how to become more effective at work - how to endure failure - how to grow more serene and resilient
How to Think More Effectively
A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking. We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a very brilliant idea or two. However, our min...
Couple's Workbook
Therapeutic exercises to help couples nurture patience, forgiveness and humour. Here is a workbook containing the very best exercises that any couple can undertake to help their relationship function optimally; exercises to foster understanding, p...
Who Am I?
One of the trickiest tasks we ever face is that of working out who we really are. If we're asked directly to describe ourselves, our minds tend to go blank. We can't just sum ourselves up. We need prompts and suggestions and more detailed enquirie...
Good Enough Parent
Raising a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life's great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck. There are many things to understand about how children's minds operate and what they need from those who...
Career Workbook
A thought-provoking and practical workbook with exercises to help you discover a career that is truly fulfilling. There are few questions harder or lonelier than, 'What should I do with the rest of my working life?' We are often simply meant to kn...
Course of Love
SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER From one of our great thinkers on modern life and the human condition - an unforgettable story of love and marriage from the author of bestselling novel Essays in Love as well as The Consolations of Philosophy, Reli...
Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life - a lucid exploration of the state in which most of us spend most of our lives 'De Bot...
Art of Travel
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER 'Honest, funny and dripping with witty aphorisms. Extremely entertaining and enlightening [...] all the way to journey's end' Herald One of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love,...
Religion for Atheists
SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and The School of Life 'A serious and optimis...