He can say surprising things: a lot has changed since Montaigne was born, almost half a millennium ago, and neither manners nor beliefs are always still recognisable. Yet to read Montaigne is to experience a series of shocks of familiarity, which make the centuries between him and the twenty-first-century reader collapse to nothing. Readers keep seeing themselves in him, just as visitors to the ‘Oxford Muse’ see themselves, or aspects of themselves, in the story of why an educated Russian works as a cleaner or of what it is like to prefer not to dance.
