Immersed in the classical philosophers, he was obsessed with death. His childhood was a mixture of 'bizarre limits' – none of the household allowed to speak to the lad in anything but Latin – and 'almost unlimited freedom'. The 20 answers to the title question are drawn from the Essays, and act as a prism for aspects of Montaigne's life and thought. Like recent books on Proust, Joyce and Austen, How to Live skilfully plucks a life-guide from the incessant flux of Montaigne's prose.

By relaxing on that issue, and letting it all roll, he allows the reader to watch him think.

But his originality is also rooted in a debate as old as philosophy itself: the struggle between thought and language (which comes first?), and their mutual interdependency. Famously, his cat had a vital part in this its gaze prompted him to recognise the idiosyncracy of perspective, as seeing a hare did for Virginia Woolf four centuries later – one of the many illuminating parallels Sarah Bakewell makes in How to Live. A 16th-century nobleman as the father of all bloggers, and his Essays as the mother of all blogs? Certainly Montaigne's idea of the 'essay' (from essai, meaning 'trial') is far closer to the rambling, highly personal, internet-spawned version than the type remembered from school, where to stray hors sujet is the quickest way to lose marks.Īs Montaigne himself recognised, his idea was indeed a new one: 'This is the only book in the world of its kind, and its plan is both wild and extravagant.' And this is because his subject, albeit 'vain and worthless', was himself. A ccording to this latest biography the idea of writing about oneself was 'invented' by Michel de Montaigne.

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