People who want to express admiration for culture often say it's valuable 'for its own sake'. The School of Life disagrees: culture is valuable because it is capable of addressing our needs for education, guidance, consolation, perspective, encouragement and correction.

Although we pay reverence to culture, few have learnt how to use it systematically. Its value is in fact therapeutic. It can assist us to get better at managing the normal troubles of everyday life; like the tendency to get unhelpfully irritated with people we like, to lose perspective over minor matters, to lose sympathy with people who deserve our compassion and to take too harsh a view of our own mistakes.

The School of Life believes that the world has, up to now, not properly made use of the huge therapeutic potential of culture. This groundbreaking book shows how to do so.