How do you get on well with people? How do you respond to violence, pain, bereavement or illness? How do you make sense of others’ behaviour? How do you stop worrying about death and pay attention to life instead? These are among many medical and psychological questions to fascinate Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), winegrower, personal essayist, and arguably the world’s first truly modern writer. Montaigne's biographer Sarah Bakewell will explore his work and ask whether reading him helps us to understand the art of physical and mental well-being in the 21st century.

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Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: a life of Michel de Montaigne (Vintage, 2011) won the Duff Cooper Award 2010 and the U.S. National Book Critics’ Circle Biography Prize 2011, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Award in biography.  She has written two previous books, The Smart (2001) and The English Dane (2005), and until 2002 was the Wellcome Library’s Assistant Curator of Early Printed Books.