Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton was born in Zurich in 1969, grew up in Switzerland and England, and studied History at Cambridge. He became known through his early books of popular philosophy — The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) — before turning, in The Art of Travel (2002), to the specific philosophy of why we travel.

The Art of Travel is not a travel book in the conventional sense — it doesn't describe a journey or recount adventures. Instead, it uses the occasions of travel (a trip to Barbados, a walk through a motorway service station, a visit to Provence) as prompts for philosophical inquiry, drawing on Ruskin, Wordsworth, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and others to ask what we are actually seeking when we leave home.

The book argues that we rarely get from travel what we expect to get, and that this is partly because we don't think clearly about what we're looking for. The Baudelaire chapter, in which he visits a London snack bar and argues that attention is what makes somewhere interesting, not the somewhere itself, became one of the most quoted passages in contemporary travel writing.

His status School of Life — a global educational company with physical venues in multiple cities — has extended many of the book's ideas into practical workshops. He is one of the few contemporary writers who has successfully made a business out of philosophy.