Breakfast With Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life
By Robert Rowland Smith
Profile £12.99, 208 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Philosophy made accessible and applied to the quotidian is nothing new. Alain de Botton, in particular, did much to demystify the discipline with How Proust Can Save Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy.

While some academics writing popular titles can unwittingly patronise newcomers, Rowland Smith manages to be funny without underestimating the reader.

Each chapter takes a routine activity – waking up, shopping, going to the gym – and offers tongue-in-cheek suggestions as to how it could be enhanced or experienced differently. So going to work, if viewed according to Hegel, Marx and Weber, is no longer “the plain exchange of labour for money” but something more polemical. And Machiavelli’s The Prince becomes a cautionary guide to parties and how to attend them while “maintaining your position in a socio-political environment”.