How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

A biography of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French nobleman who invented the essay, arranged as twenty attempts at an answer to the question of how to live. Each chapter takes one answer, such as "Don't worry about death", "Question everything" or "Let life be its own answer", and uses it to tell part of his life and thought. Bakewell covers his unusual childhood, in which he was brought up speaking Latin, his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie and his grief at La Boétie's death, his retreat to the library in his tower, a near-fatal fall from his horse, his terms as mayor of Bordeaux during the Wars of Religion, and his habit of examining himself on the page. She shows how he borrowed from Stoicism, Epicureanism and Pyrrhonian scepticism, summed up in his motto "What do I know?", and how later readers, from Pascal to the Romantics, made very different Montaignes out of the Essays.

It is the most enjoyable way into Montaigne, and it shows how an honest, curious attention to ordinary experience can itself be a philosophy of life.