'Leave my brain alone,' the dorky hero says in Peep Show, a Channel 4 sitcom, when mental fitness comes up: 'I get my brain training from Sudoku and Alain de Botton's weekly podcasts.' In truth, the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life doesn't do a weekly podcast, but his admirers could be forgiven for taking the School of Life, a boutique enterprise in Central London, for the next best thing. The great philosopher is listed as founder and chairman among the project's 'ambassadors', and though the entrepreneurial heavy lifting behind it was done by Sophie Howarth, a former curator at Tate Modern, he is very prominent in its PR. As he sees things, the school, which sells 'programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely and well', is a step towards 'an ideal new sort of institution', a 'university of life' that would encourage its students 'to master their lives through the study of culture rather than using culture for the sake of passing an exam'. Howarth, more ambiguously, has called it 'the intellectual equivalent of Space NK'.

LRB 19 May 2011 | PDF Download