English writer Sarah Bakewell is the author of engaging, accessible books about thinkers, from existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to the 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne – a work which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In her new book, Humanly Possible, Bakewell examines the centuries-long tradition of humanist thinking through the ideas and observations of a range of figures from Boccaccio and Erasmus to E.M. Forster and Zora Neale Hurston.