I had been waiting to read this book for months, so I was incredibly disappointed when I just couldn't get into it. It just felt as if Bakewell were trying to do too many things: tell a biography of Montaigne, discuss and analyze his Essays, and somehow extrapolate from those Essays a series of lessons that Montaigne supposedly knew and that we can supposedly learn from. I think what I was most resistant to in this book is the weird sort of philosophical self-help framework that the book operates under: every chapter is a lesson in "how to live" that applies to Montaigne's life and work. It just felt a little too easy/distilled, and there wasn't enough momentum to get me past page 100. (The book is also unnecessarily enormous.) It is, however, v. well-written and made me want to read Montaigne's Essays ASAP.