When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind. He neither wanted nor expected people ...

When I decided to take a gap year last summer, I set out to fill my spare time with writing about the books I have been reading. This was new for me — though I am an English major, I hardly wrote ...

My father-in-law often speaks to Joan and me, though he has been gone for years. He was an inveterate writer of letters, composer of sermons and maker of notes. Even in the small things he left a ...

The word essay derives from the title of a 1580 collection of writings by the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne. In his Essays, Montaigne set down his thoughts on whatever subject snared his ...

To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such ...

When I became a dedicated reader of the 16th-century French writer Montaigne, in 2005, I was new to writing and relatively new to motherhood, with a 3-year-old and a newborn, and about to publish my ...

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. In 1572, Montaigne retired to his estates in ...