Personal Life
Gilbert de Botton was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to a distinguished Sephardic Jewish family. Among his ancestors was the rabbinical scholar Abraham de Boton. His mother Yolande Harmer was a committed Zionist who spied the Egyptian state and elite for the Zionist authorities before the creation of the state of Israel. She was imprisoned in Egypt for this crime before being released for medical reasons in 1948. She then fled to Paris and then to Madrid. Gilbert was brought up largely by his mother's parents. His mother died in 1959. He also saw little of his father, who was an oil company representative.
Gilbert was educated at Victoria College, Alexandria; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied economics; and Columbia University in the United States, where he took a master's degree.
Gilbert de Botton married Jacqueline Burgauer in 1962. The marriage was dissolved in 1988. They had two children: a son, the writer Alain de Botton, and a daughter, Miel de Botton, a philanthropist and art collector. In 1990, he married Janet Green (formerly Janet Wolfson), the eldest daughter of the immensely wealthy Sir Isaac Wolfson, of the Great Universal Stores family, and previously the wife of multi-billionaire Michael Green. Janet de Botton is also a prominent collector of modern art.
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