Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make. This entertaining guide provides a crucial set of ideas to help us make safer, more imaginative and more effective choices in love.

An examination of the importance of self-knowledge, arming us with tools to help us better understand ourselves.

Children are, in many ways, born philosophers. Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all. Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions fall away. This is a book designed to harness children's spontaneous philosophical instinct and to develop it through introductions to some of the most vibrant and essential philosophical ideas of history. The book takes us to meet leading figures of philosophy from around the world and from all eras - and shows us how their ideas continue to...

An in-depth exploration of what really lies behind our problematic behavioural patterns in the workplace, and a blueprint for the emotional skills we need to overcome them. Modern businesses place huge emphasis on technical training. And yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of organisations has nothing to do with the sort of hard skills taught at business school; instead, it comes down to the degree of emotional intelligence circulating in the workplace. This is a book that introduces us to twenty core emotional skills that can help businesses to flourish. They range from...

One of the trickiest tasks we ever face is that of working out who we really are. If we're asked directly to describe ourselves, our minds tend to go blank. We can't just sum ourselves up. We need prompts and suggestions and more detailed enquiries that help tease out and organise our picture of ourselves. This book is designed to help us create a psychological portrait of ourselves with the use of some far more unusual, oblique, entertaining and playful prompts. The questions are designed to help us cumulatively appreciate how rich our identities are and how complicated, beautiful...

A guide to rediscovering niceness as one of the highest of all human achievements. Many books seek to make us richer or thinner. This book wants to help us to be nicer: less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer and less prickly. Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless, and one that we neglect at our peril. On Being Nice gently leads us around the key themes of the often-forgotten quality of being nice. It discusses how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural and how to reassure, as...

A collection of enlightening quotes, delivering some of the most important lessons The School of Life has to offer. This is a selection of the very best and most psychologically acute quotations from The School of Life, covering such large and diverse topics as relationships, regret, anxiety, work, friends, family, travel and, not least, the meaning of life. Some of these quotations elicit an immediate nod of recognition, others leave us thoughtful and a few are just plain funny. The book is organised by The School of Life's key themes - Relationships, Self-Knowledge,...

Explores and appreciates the small pleasures found in everyday life. 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 bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. This is a book to guide us to the best of life's small pleasures: the distinctive delight of holding a child's hand, having a warm bath or the joy of the evening sky. It is an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures to heighten the senses and return us to the world with new-found...

An engaging, alternative history of the world for children, which helps to make sense of today. The present can loom very large in a child's mind: all the crises and challenges of the modern world can feel overwhelming and at times dispiriting. This book is a big history of the world, from the beginnings of the universe to now, which places the reader at its centre. It encourages them to think about how and why they experience the world as they do and offers a helpful perspective by placing their thoughts and feelings in the context of our history and evolution. Big Ideas From...