How do you avoid being drawn into pointless arguments with a partner or colleague? / How do you deal with fanatics? / How do you balance the need to feel safe against the need to feel free? / What is the wisest way to behave if you are mugged, or assaulted, or held to ransom? / How do you reassure a gullible friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him? / How do you get over the death of someone you love? / How do you make the most of every moment, so that life does not slip away from you unnoticed and unappreciated? Questions like this - some small, others vast and barely answerable - arise in most people's lives (apart from the witch). All are variations on one great question: how do you live well?How do you do the right thing whatever life throws at you? We all face the 'how to live' question in our own way, butthe idea that looking inwards, examining one's own life, can create a mirror for others, was not always obvious.It was invented by a nobleman and wine-grower in sixteenth-century France from 1533 to 1592: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Montaigne wrote whatever was in his head, capturing fleeting states of mind, pondering on the current conflicts over religion, intolerance and cruelty but also on what to eat and drink, his cat's bird-hunting, the way his dog's ears twitch when he dreams, his family quarrels, the tribulations of his friends. He called his writings essays, or "tries", experiments upon himself.His book was an instant bestseller, and has remained so ever since - it is arguably the founding text of modernity. And even today as throughout the centuries, people who pick up his book cry out: 'Me too!', 'He's so modern!' and 'How did he know all that about me?' In keeping with his free-roaming approach, Montaigne: How to Live is an adventurous, richly textured biography which tells the story of his life through his own questions and answers - and in doing so, it helps us answer his great question for ourselves.