Eleanor Wachtel speaks with England's Sarah Bakewell about Michel de Montaigne, who lived in south-western France from 1533 to 1592. A "one-man literary revolution", it has been said that he was the first writer to make his own personality the subject of his writing. Sarah Bakewell has produced the first full biography of Montaigne in English in almost fifty years.

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer is available in paperback from Vintage.

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