"Read Montaigne," said Flaubert; "he will calm you." And indeed he does. If his philosophy could be boiled down to two mottoes, says Sarah Bakewell, they "would surely be 'anything for a quiet life' and 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.'" He is the most disarming of philosophers, the least didactic  to the point that many people wouldn't consider him a philosopher at all. "Of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible," said TS Eliot. "You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it."

He could also be literally disarming, as an anecdote from this book shows: "Once, he invited a troop of soldiers in, only to realise that they were plotting to take advantage of his hospitality by seizing the place. They abandoned the plan, however, and the leader told Montaigne why: he had been 'disarmed' by the sight of his host's 'face and frankness.'"

It's the frankness that we like about Montaigne. When talking about sex ("Montaigne liked sex, and indulged in a lot of it throughout his life") he is happy to tell us that he was not particularly well-endowed. Nature, indeed, had treated him "unfairly and unkindly". This assertion, which one cannot imagine occurring in the works of, say, Hegel (to pluck from the air someone as antithetical to Montaigne as it is possible to imagine), is in fact an important example of Montaigne's project: "Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it."

Too true; and Montaigne's importance lies in the fact that he broke the rules of traditional discourse, by letting his mind run away with him. As Bakewell points out, his essays have a tendency to go all over the place. You will not learn much about coaches from "On Coaches"; only about two of its 20 pages actually deal with the subject of the title. This is his charm, and his essence. (You will learn, though, among other things, that he is prone to seasickness, that Aristotle attributes this to fear, and that Montaigne thinks Aristotle is talking through his hat.)

So, just because Montaigne doesn't have a plan, this doesn't mean he can't be ranked with the great philosophers, because what he is doing is trying to teach us how to live, how to cope not just with the big stuff, but also with all the funny, fiddly, bothersome and trivial things that occupy us between birth and death. Bakewell's title suggests something that might belong in the self-help section of a mainstream bookstore  and I did fear something de Bottonesque  but she approaches her subject very much in a spirit of which he would have approved.

It's more ordered than Montaigne's Essays, of course. In fact few books are less ordered, both at the micro and macro level. But what she does  with "one question and twenty attempts at an answer", as her subtitle has it  is roughly map out Montaigne's life against the questions he raises along the way. The result, as the TLS reviewer put it, "is the most enjoyable introduction to Montaigne in the English language" (if I may digress in Montaignian fashion: why don't publicity departments put quotes like that from the TLS on the back of books when they earn them? It's not as if it's a disreputable or unauthoritative publication). Whether Bakewell's structure succeeds or not, or escapes from our suspicion that there may be something arbitrary to it, doesn't really matter, as she has so much that is relevant or interesting to say.

I was pleased to learn of Pyrrhonian Scepticism, which refines Socrates' claim "all I know is that I know nothing" by adding the words "and I'm not even sure about that", which not only pretty much covers every epistemological and philosophical conundrum you're ever going to run up against, but serves as the basis of Montaigne's entire oeuvre. Did I not know of Pyrrhonian Scepticism already? Maybe I have already taken the advice in the title of chapter 4: "Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted." The idea, then, is to send you back to the Essays. And it does just that.