Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 20 January 2011.
Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2010.
How to get on well with people, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought. This biography of Montaigne relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored.
Costa Book Awards 2010 Judges' comment: "A bold, original and highly enjoyable introduction to Montaigne's life and work, How to Live combines scholarship, humour and a sense of history."
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Synopsis
How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves. This first full biography of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored.
Sarah Bakewell was until recently a Curator at the Wellcome Institute Library, London. She curated an exhibition with Marina Warner for the Science Museum and is the author of The Smart and The English Dane: From King of Iceland to Tasmanian Convict.
