ALAIN DE BOTTON has become the self-help guru to the British middle-class—a life coach pitched at those who might read The Guardian on an iPad, buy ethical chocolate, and assert an interest in the Booker shortlist. If you’re a certain kind of amateur intellectual with self-improving impulses, it’s less vulgar to entrust your anxieties to a Cambridge- and Harvard-educated pop philosopher who speaks three languages than to the hearty exhortations of Tony Robbins or Oprah. Oprah asks the right questions, says de Botton—“how do we live with other people, how do we cope with our ambitions, how do we survive as a society”—but she “fails to answer them with anything like seriousness.” Enter Professor de Botton. But if the latest publications from his “School of Life” imprint are the current course curriculum, truth-seekers would be better off reading O magazine.

De Botton’s breakthrough book was How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), an effort to combine Winfrey-like wisdom with philosophical depth. As its title suggested, the book took passages from The Guermantes Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and sifted them for Proust-approved guidance on friendship, living life in the present, or self-expression. It was the first successful outing for the Alain de Botton formula: mine the work of a great thinker for choice quotations and slot them into a beguilingly simple frame—“How To Be Happy In Love,” for example. There were follow-up questions, too: “Did Proust have any relevant thoughts on dating?”

“One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself,” de Botton quotes the novelist in Proust, and this adage became the organizing principle of his subsequent work. The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), delivers potted summaries of Socrates, Epicurus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, structured around subjects like “Unpopularity” or “Not Having Enough Money,” or the brilliantly catch-all “Difficulties.” De Botton eventually became something of a middle-class lifestyle sage, producing: The Art of Travel (2002), Status Anxiety (2004), and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)—literary-lite guides to living with just enough to tickle the brain without actually taxing it.

Since 2008, de Botton has also presided over The School of Life, both a publishing imprint and a physical space near Russell Square in London. The self-declared mission of the School is to provide an enterprise that will “direct you toward a variety of useful ideas … guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, nourish and console.” The School’s shop has a few lightly stocked book-shelves (Oliver James, Paul Theroux, Italo Calvino, and, of course, the complete de Botton bibliography), while in its downstairs classroom, the School hosts talks that are a mixture of book-promos (“Steven Pinker on Violence and Humanity” to sell copies of The Better Angels of Our Nature), schedule fillers (an eight-week course on “Mindfulness,”), and champagne tastings. “There are as many kinds of fizz as there are of parties,” advises the materials for this course, and promises a “consideration of the origins of bubbles, the meaning of happiness and the strange connection between the two.” A one-day class—such as, “A Voyage in Epicuriosity with Jenny Linford,” which traces “a history from school dinners to wedding parties”—costs £150 (roughly, $240).

At a more moderate cost, the publications from The School of Life imprint further the same basic project: bring brisk, philosophically inflected practicality to universal dilemmas. There have been six books published in the series so far, one written by de Botton, the rest adopting his authorial technique. How to Stay Sane by Philippa Perry, epitomizes the worst tendencies of this formula: it amounts to little more than philosopher name-dropping with poorly written exegesis. “Socrates stated that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’” she writes. “This is an extreme stance, but I do believe that the continuing development of a non-judgemental, self-observing part of ourselves is crucial for our wisdom and sanity.” The whole book is composed of this kind of grinding obviousness, bizarrely sprinkled with a King Lear line, a Martin Buber quote, or a Wagner reference.