Whoever’s idea it was at Grupo Ferrovial, the majority shareholder of BAA and owner of Heathrow, to ask Alain de Botton, philosopher of modern life, to work as the first writer in residence at one of their airport terminals (particularly the four-football-pitches-long Terminal 5), deserves a medal. Who else since man-made-landscape fetishist, the late JG Ballard, could wax so lyrically about a transport hub? Only a man who sees in a terminus a far greater meaning – and I quote:

“Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation – from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature… then it would… be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head.”

And who else could do it so humorously?

De Botton’s talent is to slip the odd whimsical adjective into sentences of apparently dry facts, ‘opinionated’, for example, or ‘coy’, thus turning a description of aircraft hangers into comedy gold.

Aside from mischievous metaphors and canny comparisons (“In the already vacant front cabins, where it might cost the equivalent of a small car to spend the night reclining in an armchair”), observing people is what de Botton does best. He stalks weeping couples around the departures hall, the comedy coming in the details: “… for a moment it looked as if they might go outside [to] the taxi rank, but they were only buying a packet of dried mango slices from Marks and Spencer, which they fed to each other with pastoral innocence.” After chatting to a stressed father and his young family at check-in, the writer mournfully concludes: “We cannot enjoy palm trees and azure pools if a relationship to which we are committed has abruptly revealed itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment.”

Although this small tome is about much more than transport – de Botton explores favoured existential themes such as class, our relationship to work and primal emotions versus modern life – I’ll never now witness an aerobridge locking on to a plane without thinking of it as closing “its rubber mouth in a hesitant kiss over the front left-hand door”.

There’s little the attuned de Botton senses doesn’t pick up; I was dumbfounded at his summation of one particular observation I experience every time I land at Heathrow: “… how inexplicably English (in a way they will never know) the chat of the two female ground staff seems when one has the din of a street market in Lusaka still in one’s ears.”

Yes, anyone who spends too much of their time in transit should read this; it will, “give weight to the feelings that airports provoke, but which we are seldom able to sort through or elaborate upon…”. And, as the book’s last few profound paragraphs clarify, lessons gleaned from a large airport can well be applied to a surprising many aspects of our lives.

THE INTERVIEW

How should the world respond to China overtaking the US as the world’s largest economy, as it soon will? Founder of the now-defunct Marxism Today and regular The Guardian columnist Martin Jacques has spent the last decade asking that question. His book When China Rules the World attempts to answer them, as he tells Peter Myers

What first piqued your interest in China?

I first visited Asia in 1993 and was mesmerised by what I saw. I went to southern China, Hong Kong and Singapore. I didn’t expect the region to be so modern; I was fascinated by that and what it meant. Should the world be concerned about a future no longer shaped by ‘North Atlantic power, ideas and assumptions’?

It depends on how you handle uncertainty.

I find the familiar rather boring. I think the West will find it extremely difficult. If you’re in charge of the world, a lot of privileges go with that, and these will be progressively withdrawn. Westerners will find that disconcerting. I expect Chinese hegemony would be both for the good and the bad, rather as it has been under Western power.

How well do you imagine the West will engage with an Eastern power?

They don’t have much choice than to engage with it. Bush operated with the illusion that American power could re-order the world. Of course he was completely wrong. Conversely, Obama has an implicit recognition that America can’t do things on its own. However, there’ll be very powerful forces in the States that want to resist it. The decline of a major power and the rise of a rival are generally unstable periods of history.

Do you think your book will help change our thought paradigm on this subject?

I hope so. I want to tell people: I think this is what’s happening. Why don’t you see the world like this, rather that the way it has been. The less people understand the situation, the more disturbed they will be by what could happen, and the more disturbing their reactions could be.

Will the rise of China require others to adopt a Chinese work ethic?

I would imagine that it will carry its influence elsewhere, yes, but as China becomes more prosperous, the Chinese may becomes less tenacious, less work-driven, want to enjoy their leisure more. Part of the work ethic comes from poverty.

Will this book be your major legacy, or have you others up your sleeve?

I’ve not really been an author until now, and when I returned to the book after five years [the period after Jacques tragically lost his wife Harinder in 2000; she suffered an epileptic seizure and was being treated in a Hong Kong hospital], I greatly enjoyed it. It was the product of a huge amount of thinking, suffused with a lot of emotion – quite unusual in its genre. Because of the circumstances, the sheer time it took to do it – 11 years – probably made the book better, because even if you’re not working on it, you’re thinking about it. I like big projects, getting my teeth into a subject – something I can’t do with column writing. Penguin Books; US29.95.