Typically, great thinkers have been included in encyclopedic works on the basis of reputation and historic influence.

The School of Life takes a different approach, focusing instead on the thinkers whose ideas are the most helpful to our lives now. This is a collection of sixty of the most important and most useful ideas of Eastern and Western culture. The focus of this book is to present some of the greatest minds of our time in a clear, relevant and charming light. Many of these thinkers have previously been caught in a fiendish trap; what they’ve said has been hugely relevant and important, but how they have said it has resulted in them going unheard.

The sixty chosen thinkers include La Rochefoucauld, Lao Tzu, Matsuo Basho, Sen no Rikyu, Alexis de Tocqueville, St Benedict, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Andrea Palladio, Coco Chanel, Henri Matisse; as well as more familiar entries such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Marx, Confucius and Freud.