Typically, great thinkers have been included in encyclopedic works on the basis of reputation and historic influence. The School of Life takes a different approach, focusing instead on the thinkers whose ideas are the most helpful to our lives now. This is a collection of sixty of the most important and most useful ideas of Eastern and Western culture. The focus of this book is to present some of the greatest minds of our time in a clear, relevant and charming light. Many of these thinkers have previously been caught in a fiendish trap; what they’ve said has been hugely relevant and important, but how they have said it has resulted in them going unheard. The sixty chosen thinkers include La Rochefoucauld, Lao Tzu, Matsuo Basho, Sen no Rikyu, Alexis de Tocqueville, St Benedict, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Andrea Palladio, Coco Chanel, Henri Matisse; as well as more familiar entries such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Marx, Confucius and Freud.

Great Thinkers: Simple tools from sixty great thinkers to improve your life today. (The School of Life Library)

Biographies & Memoirs

The School of Life

Arts & Literature

Few life skills are as neglected, yet as important, as the ability to remain calm. Our very worst decisions and interactions are almost invariably the result of a loss of calm – and a descent into anxiety and agitation. Surprisingly, but very fortunately, our power to remain calm can be rehearsed and improved. We don’t have to stay where we are now: our responses to everyday challenges can dramatically alter. We can educate ourselves in the art of keeping calm not through slow breathing or special teas but through thinking. This is a book that patiently unpacks the causes of our greatest stresses and gives us a succession of highly persuasive, beautiful and sometimes dryly comic arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and fury.

Calm (The School of Life Library)

Religion & Spirituality

So often, we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures - while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which - if only we paid more attention - could daily bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. But we need some encouragement to focus our gaze. This is a book to guide us to the best of life's small pleasures: everything from the distinctive delight of holding a child's hand to the enjoyment of disagreeing with someone to the joy of the evening sky; an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm.

Small Pleasures (The School of Life Library)

Love has a history and we ride – sometimes rather helplessly – on its currents. Since around 1750, we have been living in a highly distinctive era in the history of love that we can call Romanticism. And it has been a disaster for love. Relationships challenges the assumptions of the Romantic view of love. It shows how to develop new attitudes that can lead to a psychologically mature vision of love: ▪ That it is ok that love and sex may not always belong together ▪ That discussing money early on, in a serious way, is not a betrayal of love ▪ That realising that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple ▪ That we will never find everything we need in another person, nor they in us ▪ That spending two hours discussing whether bathroom towels should be hung up or can be left on the floor has its own dignity Full of applied real-life examples, and enlivened throughout with humour and cultural anecdote, this innovative guide paves the way to a new, brighter future for love.

Relationships (The School of Life Library)

Self-Help

Relationships

The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just painfully necessary is a strikingly recent invention. Nowadays, in prosperous areas of the world, we don’t only expect to obtain money through labour, we also, to a greater or lesser extent, expect to find meaning and satisfaction. It’s a big ask and explains why career crises are so common. Unfortunately, it is devilishly hard to understand oneself well enough to know quite where one’s energies should be directed. A Job To Love is designed to help us better understand ourselves in order to locate a job that is right for us. It explores the many myths, traps and confusions that get in our way, and shows how to develop new, effective attitudes and habits. With compassion and a deeply practical spirit, this book guides us to discover our true talents and to make sense of our confused desires and aspirations before it is too late.

A Job to Love: A practical guide to finding fulfilling work by better understanding yourself. (The School of Life Library)

Business & Money

Job Hunting & Careers

Shame means that many couples still find it difficult to be honest with one another about who they are and what they need to feel sexually satisfied. We shouldn’t suppose that we can always and invariably share our every sexual proclivity with others, but there’s a lot we could feel more confident about expressing. Things that seem strange can turn out to be quite understandable when we consider them rationally; there’s an important role for philosophical analysis in stretching the understanding we have of our own desires. Sex explores a range of sexual enthusiasms in order to help us acknowledge hitherto forbidden aspects of ourselves and to communicate them in unpanicked, undefensive ways to our partners. Its goal is to help us to be maturely unfrightened of our own sexuality; to reduce unnecessary shame; and to increase opportunities for moments of courageous and relationship-enhancing honesty.

Sex: An open approach to our unspoken desires. (The School of Life Library)

Parenting & Relationships

Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We know that perfection is not on the cards. Nevertheless, errors of deep-seated incompatibility in married couples seem to occur with appalling ease and regularity. This entertainingly informative book examines the reasons why – and then suggests a new approach to marriage. The time has come to bury the Romantic intuition-based view of marriage and learn to practice and rehearse marriage as one would ice-skating or violin playing, activities no more deserving of systematic periods of instruction.

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person: A pessimist’s guide to marriage, offering insight, practical advice, and consolation. (Essay Books)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

We don’t think we hate cheap things – but we frequently behave as if we rather do. Consider the clean cotton t-shirt. We wouldn't regard this as a particularly stylish fashion choice, and certainly not as a glamorous one. We are unlikely to stare wistfully at a cotton t-shirt in a shop window, or buy one in anticipation of a special event. We don't luxuriate in the feel of the fabric when we pull the freshly laundered garment over our head - yet Louis XVI would have been deeply impressed by this rare and decadent phenomenon. The t-shirt itself has not changed; only our attitude to it. When we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full. Yet as its market price falls, passion has a habit of fading away. It’s a pattern that we see recurring in a range of areas – and it’s a cultural misfortune. We need to rethink our patterns of consumption. This entertainingly informative book considers how to do so, and shows how more of the things we could love are already to hand. We might be surprised to find that we are already a good deal richer than we are encouraged to think.

Why We Hate Cheap Things (Essay Books)

Marketing & Sales

Most books that want to change us seek to make us richer or thinner. This book wants to help us to be nicer: that is, less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer, less prickly… Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless and one that we neglect at our peril. This is a guidebook to the uncharted landscape of niceness, gently leading us around the key themes of this forgotten quality. We learn how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural and how to reassure. We learn that niceness is compatible with strength and is no indicator of naivety. Niceness deserves to be rediscovered as one of the highest of all human achievements.

On Being Nice: This guidebook explores the key themes of 'being nice' and how we can achieve this often overlooked accolade. (The School of Life Library)

Happiness

We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free ranging variety of confidence – one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives. On Confidence walks us gently and wryly around the key issues that stop us from making more of our potential.

On Confidence (Essay Books)

Self-Esteem

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