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Ideas to live by

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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Breakfast Club at The School of Life

10 March 2010

Our breakfasts, led by philosophers Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon, offer a variety of big ideas for tackling life’s everyday challenges.

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How To Be Cool

10 March 2010

Who should go to an event called How to Be Cool? Those who are cool or those who are not?

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How Necessary Is A Relationship?

11 March 2010

Most of us would agree that while love can make us happier it can also make us more miserable than anything else. So is it really worth it?

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Allegra McEvedy on Gluttony

14 March 2010

Gluttony is to food what drunk is to booze: over-indulgence, to be sure, but nothing for which one should be hung out to dry. Join celebrity chef, Allegra McEvedy for a passionate polemic on the pleasures of good food.

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How To Think About Death

15 March 2010

We might be a death-denying culture, if the way that we cloth death and keep it out of sight is anything to go by. So how can we think about it, what should we make of it, what resources are there to help us deal with it?

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On Mutuality

Mark Earls

You and I have almost certainly never met, but what happens to you matters to me – your health, your happiness and your wealth – and vice versa. Mutuality rather than independence is the chief characteristic of human life, whatever we'd like to believe.

On Perspective

Charles Leadbeater

Modern life is an amazing deal. If you make it to this time tomorrow you'll have gained, for free, another five hours, by just turning up for life. Yet this huge achievement, the ever-increasing life expectancy, comes with scary, unintended consequences: loneliness, dementia, and more years with chronic health conditions.

On Distraction

Alain de Botton

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is how we can relearn to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

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