Dorothy Rowe

Available since 4th September 2000, The paperback edition was published in September 2001, with the same cover.

One of our most admired and loved psychologists turns her attention to the essence of the good relationship, and why we need enemies as well as friends.

The desire for friendship is fundamental to everyone - without friendship no amount of wealth, fame, power or achievement will bring us happiness, and changes in society mean that friendship is more important than ever, as we look to friends for the support and closeness that in the past would have been assumed to come fiim family networks.

Friendship at its best can be both glorious and precious.

Yet, if human beings crave good relationships, they also need bad ones. In imagining we have enemies we at least have the comfort of knowing that someone, somewhere, is thinking of us. People and nations seek out both allies and hate-figures, whether they are children at school or the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. It is often easy to hate, even easier to be hated, and we rarely ask why people choose to be enemies rather than friends - whether we can live without enemies or why friendship is so difficult to achieve.

By delving into what it is that makes us hate as well as what makes us love, Dorothy Rowe addresses fundamental issues of human behaviour, drawing upon her own prodigious wisdom and the work of neuroscientists and intelligence specialists to show not only what friendship is but how it may be learned as a skill.

"Dorothy Rowe is that rarest of creatures - an intellectual who not only possesses a profound wisdom about the way people are but is also superb at communicating that wisdom. She expresses life-changing ideas with magnificent clarity. I have read all her books at least twice, and I recommend you do the same."
Tim Lott

"Dorothy Rowe is a most extraordinary and valuable person. Not only is she phenomenally wise, but she imparts her wisdom in a kind of prose poetry that moves, enlightens, reforms, beguiles and educates all at once."
Fay Weldon

"Dorothy Rowe is full of robust good sense, rare intuitive wisdom and unhurried sensitivity. She pursues meaning, self-knowledge and understanding with patient ferocity. She is a giver of courage."
Nigella Lawson

Jacket photography © Mary Teresa McGouran
Author photograph © Bob Seary