The Complete Essays
About this audiobook
In 1572, Montaigne – nobleman, humanist, and thoroughly Renaissance man – retired to the seclusion of his estate in the Dordogne and started to write. From his pen poured a stream of ‘essays’ – attempts to capture the observations that came to him on an idiosyncratic range of subjects, from ancient customs, cannibals and books to thumbs, war-horses and the wearing of clothes. He made the study of himself the starting point for investigations into how to live, and wrote with a startlingly modern candour about love, grief, friendship, sex and death. His voice, by turns lively, curious, digressive, ironic and moving, is utterly captivating. The Essays feel less like a work of literature and more like an ongoing conversation with a very well-informed friend.
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About the author
Peter Wickham was born in New Zealand and studied for the theatre at the Rose Bruford College in England. He has worked as an actor in the West End, and in theatres all over the UK and abroad, from Venezuela to Laos. He has performed in television and film, and has written a successful series of introductions to Shakespeare for the BBC World Service. He was a member of the BBC Radio Drama Company, where reading short stories and serials started his audiobook career. For Naxos AudioBooks, he has read Casanova’s The Story of My Life, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Hobbes’s Leviathan.
