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. He looks like a young man who beams rather than smiles shyly at the camera, genuinely pleased that it may capture and faithfully reproduce his happiness. He looks, in fact, like someone who has absolutely no right to write a book entitled “The Consolations of Philosophy”: what, exactly, does this very young writer want to be consoled for? Aside from hair, he seems to have everything: international success, good looks, youth, charm, intelligence, money, and he’s not even married; yet he seeks solace from philosophers, “to console him in his grief.” And, as we talk at de Botton’s home in London, I get a sense of the depth of his sadness, which is poorly concealed by his permanent smile and warm manner.

Did I say home? This house is full of boxes, for Alain is actually packing and moving elsewhere. He has also just arrived from a long tour in America, and is about to embark on another, of Switzerland and Germany. A few hours after our meeting, he will write to me in an email: “I bear the dubious title of being Switzerland’s most commercially successful living writer - though most literary Swiss would be very surprised to hear that, probably imagining that I’m French or English!” Most British readers, I might add, would be very puzzled to hear that he is Swiss. And readers anywhere might be astonished to know that he is Jewish. His father, who died this year, was an Egyptian Jew from Alexandria; his mother, also Jewish, is from St Gallen in Switzerland. Alain himself was born in Zurich, and spent the first 12 years of his life there - if you don’t count the English boarding school he had been sent to from the age of eight.

And here it is, that first - and as I’m to discover, permanent - source of Alain’s grief: that early exile from his idyllic, free childhood in Zurich’s Bergstrasse where, he says, “my sister and I wandered about everywhere on our bikes.” But suddenly, there was a violent change and he found himself in a strict boys’ boarding school in Oxford, where he was now the strange outsider, a shy small boy who spoke with an accent and didn’t like anything the local boys were obsessed with: “I hated football, and any sports. I was teased and bullied. People who get bullied at school are often very stoic, they don’t show their pain.”

Not even to his parents? “I was quite intimidated by my parents. I wasn’t going to question their judgement. Their decision to send me to that school just seemed like an act of God.”

It so happens that I met Alain’s father, Gilbert de Botton, a few years ago, and liked him enormously. He was an unusual, extremely charismatic man. We were sitting next to each other at a formal dinner - I think it was a fundraising occasion and, like many other wealthy guests (people like me had been invited only to provide some comic relief!) he was probably expected to contribute a donation to some worthy cause. We talked about schools in England and I said I was against private schools in general, and boarding schools in particular. He was very interested in this topic and said that he had once believed they were the best possible form of education in the world, but that he now thinks he may have been wrong. He had looked sad as he said this. Now I knew why.

Alain’s father was a phenomenally successful financier, but his origins, in Egypt, had been very poor. He was the only child of divorced parents, barely supported by his mother who was too busy doing intelligence work for the future state of Israel. After spending some time in Egyptian jails, she and her son ended up in Israel, where she died of cancer. Gilbert eventually found a simple job in a trading firm in Switzerland, but his talents were such that by the age of 32, he had been entrusted by the Rothschthilds to set up the Swiss branch of their bank. Alain grew up against the secure backdrop of his parents’ increasing financial success, but, he says, “My father was always convinced we would die starving. He was terrified, literally. He had the typical immigrant’s paranoia. In the same way that you get penniless aristocrats who are totally comfortable in life, who feel they own the country, similarly you get Jewish immigrants with money who feel that they’re paupers.”

So it is no accident that in this book, de Botton has a chapter about “Not Having Enough Money” rather than “Being Poor”. “Financial anxiety is not limited to those without money,” he says with a smile.

But he wasn’t raised by his father in the belief that he had the family money to rely on. He had to fend for himself, from a young age, and his own financial success is due entirely to his own efforts and hard work. “I was highly ambitious in my 20s. When I started writing I thought, if it doesn’t support me, I’ll go and do something else.”

He chose to write books - on Proust, on love, on philosophy - in which he analyzes, in his own uniquely witty way, thoughts and emotions. “I’m doing something that’s very common in our culture - to evolve your own thought with the help of other people. It’s a condition that’s existed really ever since the renaissance: the wheel has already been invented, what do we do when we come along? So that’s really what I’m doing, I’m reading others.”

Why not write novels? “Novels have to be set in very concrete locations, they tend to belong to a certain milieu, and my problem was, I don't really know what milieu I come from. For me, the place we come from is books - that was the family identity. Because we weren’t really Swiss, we weren’t really British, we weren’t really Egyptian, not really Israeli. This confusion made it very problematic for me to be a novelist.”

His book on philosophy has chapter headings like “Unpopularity,” “Frustration,” “Inadequacy,” “A Broken Heart,” “Difficulties”. He deals with these issues with a light touch, but does not hide the fact that these are, for him, real experiences, some of them very painful ones. He was drawn to philosophers whose lives reflected their writing and teaching: Socrates, Montaigne, Seneca, Epicurus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Some academic philosophers have accused Alain de Botton of superficiality in his treatment of these subjects. This makes him angry: “I actually see myself as a rebel against academia. They say I have not really understood the subtleties, and I think, bullshit, I have. I don’t accept the accusation that this book is not academically rigorous. I’ve taken away all the scaffollding, but I can show you seemingly simple passages where there are four books that have been read and digested behind a certain point. “ His aim is not to simplify philosophy, but to show us a fresh way of enjoying and learning from it, of enriching our lives.

As a writer, de Botton is not bound by the time and place he happens to live in at the moment: his writing has a kind of timeless quality. This is true of him as well, I realize. He is only 31 but does not seem the be the product of a particular youth or pop culture, nor particularly interested in it. He agrees: “That’s true. Although I’m very absorbed by what goes on around me, I don't want the time in which I live to be a backdrop. I don't want to write journalistically about the present. Even when I do write about the present, I want to bring in the eternal aspects. This is what I really admire in Nietzsche, seeing the eternal in the particular, linking us to other times.”

He could do that, it occurs to me, by following the strands in his own ancient family history. Some of Alain’s ancestors on his father’s side were eminent Sephardic rabbis who wrote celebrated commentaries on Maimonides, the great medieaval Jewish philosopher. Perhaps he’s not so different from them, in his quest for comfort in wisdom and art.