Alain de Botton's philosophical week at Heathrow

Alain de Botton's books include The Architecture of Happiness, How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping, and the Novel. The Swiss-born, London-resident philosopher has written delightfully about love, literature and life. So when British Airways invited him to be Heathrow Airport's first-ever writer-in-residence, he accepted the offer immediately. The result is A Week at the Airport.

The book is about the airport as a mirror of the human condition. Through de Botton's eyes, we see what's often regarded as a place of boredom and stress as a theatre full of hope, sadness and mystery:

"Some lovers were parting. She must have been twenty, he a few years older. Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood was in her bag. They had oversize sunglasses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. They were dressed casually in combat trousers and T-shirts. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like passion from afar was revealed at closer range to be unusual devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief, he was cradling her in his arms, stroking her short blonde hair, in which a hairclip in the shape of a tulip had been fastened."