Within moments of starting to write 'On Vanity', he's remembering a man who had seven or eight days' worth of filled chamber pots by him at all times and 'communicated his life by the workings of his belly.' Before long he's telling us how he'd have liked a son-in-law later, he muses on cheating servants, astrologers, courtesy, Lacedaemonians, and Paris. Whether he's writing about cannibals, thumbs, experience, glory or drunkenness, there's always a side-issue, a backwater, a beckoning digression, and he takes them joyfully. Montaigne was an expert at both, but deferral always won. It's all an ongoing conversation, across time.

Montaigne's signature phrase is 'but I don't know.' He may be wrong. An essay is a gesture of imperfection, an essai - an 'attempt' or a 'trial'. He doesn't instruct or boast but asks us to join him in looking at himself, wondering how one should live and hopefully becoming 'reconciled to this colicky life'. Rousseau made a similar claim for his Confessions but its very title placed him firmly centre-stage - he, not his book, was the unique object - while the Essays put Montaigne on a level with the reader. 'It is,' he says, 'the only book in the world of its kind', and I suppose it remains so even today. The subject of this 'Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer' was pleased with his Essays.

Early on in this illuminating and humane book, Sarah Bakewell announces that it is not only about about Michel de Montaigne the man and the writer, but also 'about Montaigne, the long party'.

How to live bakewell