michel de montaigne

There are few things more pleasurable than conversing with the great master of the essay, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). Sarah Bakewill’s excellent How to Live: A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (2011) has inspired wide current interest in Montaigne as a writer whom readers uncannily feel they know—our contemporary. He lived in a deeply contested and divided society, to which his answer was to become the greatest reader of his age. His essays, among the best ever written, bring all of life into discussion: from birth to death, from his hometown to the New World being explored and exploited in his day, all the virtues and the vices, cannibals and cats, drunkenness, books he read, names, thumbs, coaches,…