How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer - Tapa dura

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love - such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy?

This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them 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, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves.

This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life 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. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boétie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers - who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'

It may seem surprising to suggest that we twenty-first-century Westerners should trace our heritage to a sixteenth-century Gascon nobleman who retired to a book-filled tower and devoted his days to 'folding his gaze inward'. But it is true: we are all Montaigneans.

We owe to Montaigne the idea that immersion in one's inner world can be a sociable act, and that what makes us an individual also brings out the humanity we share with others. Living from 1533 to 1592, in a France dominated by bloody and miserable civil war, he maintained as private a life as possible while writing a hundred or so lively, revealing pieces which he called essais, or 'tries'. He talks about

feelings that are hard to express or even to notice: about the experience of being lazy, or brave, or indecisive; about lying; about obsessive fears of death or illness, and the way they seem to recede as

actual misfortunes increase. He often describes the sheer pleasure of being alive - a sensation he has learned to enhance simply by paying close attention to it.

This book tells his life story - the first biography in English for nearly fifty years - examining his youthful journeys to Italy and his friendships, with the scholar and poet Etienne la Boétie and with his protégée and virtual adopted daughter Marie de Gournay. But it also traces the way generations of readers have felt drawn to him since his death, recognising their own features in his self-portrait. Ultimately it asks what we today, might discover from looking in that portrait - or rather, in that mirror.