Shelfology Book Pairing

A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, whose free-roaming explorations of his own thought and experience were unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. 'The Essays' was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred hears later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves. This first full biography of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored - back cover.

A Scenario

by Annie Jacobsen

Up to now, no one outside of official circles has known exactly what would happen if a rogue state launched a nuclear missile at the Pentagon. Second by second and minute by minute, these are the real-life protocols that choreograph the end of civilisation as we know it. Frantic calls over secure lines work to confirm the worst as armoured helicopters are scrambled to evacuate the chosen few to secure bunkers. One nuclear missile will provoke two dozen in return. Decisions over hundreds of millions of lives need to be made within six minutes, based on partial information, knowing that once launched, nothing is capable of halting the destruction. Based on dozens of new interviews with military and civilian experts, Nuclear War is at once a compulsive non-fiction thriller and a powerful argument that we must rid ourselves of these world-ending weapons for ever.