A selection of Michel de Montaigne’s most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition featuring an introduction by Yiyun Li

‘I myself am the subject of my book’. So wrote Montaigne in the introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of the modern essay form. In works of probing intelligence and idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal reflection to roving theories of the conduct of kings and cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of human memory and judgement.

This new selection of Montaigne’s most ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know? offers the modern reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.