The School Of Life: 27 books

A dictionary is a guide to a language. This dictionary is for the distinctive language that The School of Life ‘speaks’: that of emotions. It is an alphabetical selection of some 200 words and phrases that shed light on our feelings about ourselves, other people, and the workings of the modern...

Modern businesses place huge emphasis on technical training, yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of an organisation has nothing to do with the traditional 'hard' skills taught at business school, but rather the sophisticated 'soft' skills that are key to emotional maturity. The...

Happiness is a loaded term that means different things to different people. To some, it might mean life satisfaction, to others, a fleeting moment of joy. Rather than seeking to be happy, Oliver James encourages us to cultivate our emotional health. Outlining the five elements of good emotional health...

This 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 us today. We’ve worked hard to make the thinkers in this book...

Many of us are attracted to the idea of marriage and yet feel a bit uncomfortable with some of the rituals that are traditionally associated with the big day. Perhaps the old ceremonies place too much emphasis on the supernatural or else seem out of step with some of the complex realities of contemporary...

It is quite normal to feel frustrated and sorrowful about aspects of modern capitalism, but realistic hope of change can seem either utopian or demented. In fact, the way that capitalism works is inherently open to alteration and improvement. This is because the problems of capitalism are, in their...

Our relationship with money is one that lasts a lifetime, yet traditionally books on the subject tend to take one of two routes: a) how to get more, or b) how to deal with less. John Armstrong turns these approaches upside down, and looks not at money itself, but at how we relate to it and the meaning...

Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different premise:...

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 professional potential. But it is also profoundly misunderstood...

To wonder too openly or intensely about the meaning of life can seem a peculiar, ill-fated and faintly ridiculous pastime. It can seem like a topic on which ordinary mortals cannot make much progress. In truth, it is for all of us to wonder about, define and work towards a more meaningful existence. This...

Alongside a satisfying relationship, a career we love is one of the foremost requirements for a fulfilled life. Unfortunately, it is devilishly hard to understand oneself well enough to know quite where one’s energies should be directed. It is to help us out of some of these impasses that we wrote...

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 that works of culture were all made, in one way or...

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...

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 we are that we can make reliable decisions – particularly...