The School Of Life Press: 22 books

Love has, quite unfairly, come to be associated with being happy. However, it is also one of the most reliable routes to misery. We tend to treat our sadness individually, as if it were unique and shameful. But, as this book explains, there are some solid reasons why love should be highly sorrowful...

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 nev-ertheless...

Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make, and the cost of repeated failure is immense. How to Find Love explains why we have the ‘types’ we do, and how our early experiences give us scripts of how and whom we love. It sheds light on harmful repetitive...

We live under a cheerful delusion that sex might nowadays be easy – because we have been ‘liberated’ from the hang-ups and taboos of the olden days. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Despite a veneer of openness, sex remains an extraordinarily complicated business, hard to discuss...

Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We don’t expect bliss every day. The fault isn’t entirely our own; it has to do with the devilish truth that anyone we’re liable to meet is going to be rather wrong, in some fascinating way or another, because this is simply...

We don’t think we hate cheap things, of course, but we often behave as if we do. We rarely properly appreciate what is around us and doesn’t appear to cost very much – for example, the night sky, pencils, fried eggs, zips, and the holding of hands. This essay explores the way we can grow disenchanted...

Going travelling is one of the few things we undertake in a direct attempt to make ourselves happy - and frequently, in fascinating ways, we fail. We get bored, cross, anxious or lonely. It isn't surprising our societies act as if going travelling were simple, just a case of handing over the right...

Work can be a route to creativity, excitement and purpose. Nevertheless, many of us end up confused, discouraged and beaten by our working lives. The temptation is often just to blame ourselves, and to feel privately ashamed and guilty. However, as this book lucidly explains, there is a range of well-embedded...