'[Alain de Botton’s] The Architecture of Happiness is rather like a rubbery Starbucks cappuccino: it is 65 per cent shattering banality presented in a froth of Latinate polysyllables.

Once you factor in the (pretty, but largely redundant) illustrations and all that tasteful white space, the philosopher-prince is left with little room in which to be sensible. Over 280 pages, the effect is one of rubbernecking at a literary car-crash. De Botton's periodic losses of mental traction - he describes the Sage Gateshead as "a warmer hedgehog-related creature" - are as guiltily mesmerising as his tone of solemn wonder, which effortlessly negotiates hurdles ("its harmony with our own prized internal song"; "like a smile breaking over a child's face") that weaker-stomached writers might baulk at.'