MontaigneStefan Zweig, trans. Will Stone(Pushkin Press, 160 PP, £10)Tablet bookshop price £9 • tel 01420 592974
Stefan Zweig, the worshipper of Freud, was bound to find a kindred spirit in Montaigne, the great “auto-psychologist”. That thirst for self-knowledge informs the passionate identification of writer with subject that makes Zweig’s many biographies so engaging. He had already written a thinly veiled account of himself in his study of Erasmus. In the last months before his suicide in 1942, he discovered in Montaigne his doppelgänger: a man in constant flux, Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic by turns, a mercurial lover of life with a firm admiration for those who will their own death. The life of Montaigne unfolds in the present tense as if Z
14 January 2016, The Tablet
Ways of escape
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