True life biography

Recommended by Nick Hornby:

Sarah Bakewell’s book is a biography with a difference.

Like every great life in the arts, Montaigne’s is hundreds of years long. He happens to have died in 1592, but his influence is everywhere: in Hamlet’s soliloquies, in every newspaper, on every blog. Montaigne, for better or for worse, invented the personal essay — really — and this singular book explores some of the ideas these essays raised, and traces Montaigne’s survival from generation to generation.

There’s a more conventional biography in here, too, but Bakewell manages to thread it into a philosophical self-help book about grief, conviviality, work, originality and a lot of other subjects that Montaigne wanted us to think about.

As a consequence, How To Live is original, accessible, thoughtful,