"Travellers passing through Heathrow Airport in London this week may be surprised to encounter, in the middle of bustling Terminal 5, the writer Alain de Botton, author of popular books including “How Proust Can Change Your Life” and “The Art of Travel,” seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer. His typing appears in real time on a screen behind him, and a placard explains — in what apparently is both a literary and aeronautic first — that Mr. de Botton is serving a one-week appointment as Heathrow’s “writer in residence.”

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