The Consolations of Philosophy - Reviews

Alison Lurie in The New York Review of Books, 15 March 2007 
Today we expect nonfiction to be either comic or somber: to make us laugh, or to inform us, warn us, or terrify us with accounts of miserable childhoods or natural and political disasters. The idea that prose might be both casual in manner and serious in intent is almost forgotten. It survives, however, in the work of Alain de Botton. More...

Elena Lappin in Tages Anzeiger (Zurich), May 2000
If you look up Alain de Botton’s internet website (www.alaindebotton.com), you could be forgiven for thinking that his impressive gallery of photographs is a little on the boastful side. More...

George Brock in The Times (Metro), 8-14 April 2000
For an egghead, Alain de Botton suddenly finds himself a hot property. He’s just made a Channel 4 television series on philosophy; he popped up the other day in a recent BBC documentary on Proust. In that delicious new coining, our small, perfectly informed pundit is tubiquitous. More...

James Delingpole in The Spectator, 8 April 2000
If Alain de Botton weren’t a friend of mine, I think I would probably hate him. In fact, I know I would hate him because even when he wasn’t as disgustingly famous and successful as he is now, I found myself loathing his guts on principle. More... 

Ben Rogers in The Sunday Telegraph, 2 April 2000
Nietzsche believed, according to Alain de Botton, that artists are not so much born but self-made. It is by learning from their failures that great writers and painters are formed. One living counter-instance of this theory is surely de Botton himself, just 30 years old, with four effortlessly charming books behind him and a style to die for. More...

Humphrey Carpenter in The Sunday Times, 2 April 2000
"There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth." So wrote the essayist Montaigne in the late 16th century, and, at first glance, Alain de Botton’s new book seems to run a risk by quoting this remark in its chapter on Montaigne More...

John Banville in Irish Times, 1 April 2000
No doubt about it, philosophy is the new rock and roll, and Alain de Botton is its Colonel Tom Parker. The Consolations of Philosophy is the book of the Channel 4 television series, Philosophy: A Guide to Life, written and presented by de Botton, and is also available as an audiobook