Alain de botton children

Your first languages were French and German. Did that inheritance give you a different perspective on life?

I don’t exactly know. It’s true that many of my favourite books, both fiction and non-fiction, are French and German, and perhaps I’m closer to the sensibility I find in many of them. Maybe you acquire these things by osmosis. I grew up in Switzerland, in a French-speaking household (though my mother is a native German-speaker). I came from a Jewish family and I was proud of that in a secular way, and culturally aware.

Do you think your parents had a particular influence on the formation of your early mind?

Not directly. I was never told as a child to read Montaigne or anything; but I saw that my father (who was a businessman) was a very keen reader and so, though no one ever said ‘Books are important,’ I just picked it up.

Another influence, I think, was the spirit of Switzerland. It’s very committed to a certain vision of democracy and egalitarianism, and so even though in many ways it’s a very privileged place, and some of its gains are slight

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