It is almost three hundred closely typed pages long with endless case studies and footnoting, but the thrust of Emotional Intelligence can be summed up in three dot points:

• through the application of intelligence to emotion, we can improve our lives immeasurably;
• emotions are habits, and like any habit can undermine our best intentions;
• by unlearning some emotions and developing others, we gain control of our lives.

If this were all there was to it, it would not be a very interesting book, but Emotional Intelligence is one of most successful self-help tomes of the last decade, and has reached well beyond what would normally be considered a traditional self-help reading audience. Researchers had been expanding our idea of what intelligence is for some time, but it took Goleman's book to catapult the idea of emotional intelligence into the mainstream. Saying that IQ is not a particularly good predictor of achievement, that it is only one of many 'intelligences', and that emotional skills are statistically more important in life success, Emotional Intelligence was bound to be well-received.

In looking at the way the brain is wired, the book removes some of the mystery from our feelings, particularly the compulsive ones. The physiology of our brains is a hangover from ancient times when physical survival was everything. This brain structure was designed for 'acting before thinking', useful when in the path of a flying spear or in an encounter with an angry mammoth. We are people walking around in the 21st century with the brains of cave-dwellers, and the author tells us about the 'emotional hijackings' that can trigger spur of the moment murder, even of a longstanding spouse.

As Goleman emphasises, the problem is not the emotions per se , but their appropriate use in given situations. He quotes Aristotle: 'Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - this is not easy.' Aristotle's challenge becomes all the more important in a technologically advanced world, because the meaning of 'civilisation' ceases to be technological, defaulting back to the nature of man and the quest for self-control.

Part of Goleman's motivation in writing Emotional Intelligence was the thought of millions of readers relying on self-help books which 'lacked scientific basis', and indeed Emotional Intelligence comes out of an impeccable academic and research milieu.

Yet this is still a self-help book in the classic mould. Pointing to the extraordinarily malleable circuitry of the brain, and our ability to shape the experience of our emotions, one of his great points is that 'temperament is not destiny'. We are not beholden to our habits of mind and emotion, even if they seem like an unchangeable part of us.