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Who is Theophrastus, and why should we care? Once, he was the equal
of Plato and Aristotle. Together he and Aristotle invented science.
Alone he invented Botany. The character of the Wife of Bath is his
invention, the Canterbury Tales as a whole, perhaps, the product of
his inspiration. When Linnaeus was developing our modern system of
plant taxonomy, it was Theophrastus' work on plants that he used as
a basis. So how could one man do so much and still sink almost
without a trace? This is the story of a journey to find him and
bring him back from oblivion. Looking for Theophrastus, in all the
places he must have walked and lived, it tells how he and
Aristotle, his friend and tutor, broke with the philosophical
conventions of the Academy and left on their own adventure; of how
together they invented what we now take for granted as the Natural
Sciences; how, not content with that, they made the great
experiment of applying philosophy directly to the practicalities of
government through the tutoring of Alexander the Great; how they
were disappointed and how, in the end, they returned to Athens and
founded the famous Lyceum. Against the dramatic context of his time
- the end of democracy in Athens and the rise of Alexander the
Great; the great battles and vast territorial expansion that
followed; the flowering of the philosophy schools on which so much
of our culture and thinking is founded - and on, following his
cultural legacy through to the modern day, it explores how we
perceive, understand and, most importantly, how we relate to the
world around us, questioning what we lose from our way of living
when we forget those ancients who first taught us how to see.
'Clever, brave and urgent. I thought about Lost Property for days
after I finished it.' Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall 'Fascinating
and eloquent discussion of nationalism, art and conflict, leavened
with wry humour.' Mail on Sunday ____________________ In the middle
of her life, a writer finds herself in a dark wood, despairing at
how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and
indifference. In an attempt to understand her country and her
species, she and her lover rent a busted-out van and journey
through France and down to the Mediterranean, across Italy and the
Balkans, finishing in Greece and its islands. Along the way, they
drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the
Italian Renaissance, the 1990s and on to the current refugee
crisis, encountering the shades of history, sometimes figuratively
and sometimes - such as Joan of Arc, sitting pertly in the back of
the van - quite literally. As she roadtrips through 10,000 years of
civilization, watching humanity repeat itself with wars over
borderlines and exceed itself with the creation of timeless art,
the writer begins to reckon with the very worst and the very best
in our collective natures - and it is in seeing the beauty beside
the ugliness, the light among the trees, that she begins to see,
finally, a way for her to go home.
'Clever, brave and urgent. I thought about Lost Property for days
after I finished it.' Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall 'Fascinating
and eloquent discussion of nationalism, art and conflict, leavened
with wry humour.' Mail on Sunday ____________________ In the middle
of her life, a writer finds herself in a dark wood, despairing at
how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and
indifference. In an attempt at escape, she and her lover rent a
busted-out van and journey through France and down to the
Mediterranean, across Italy and the Balkans, finishing in Greece
and its islands. Along the way, they drive through the Norman
Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the Italian Renaissance, the
Balkan wars of the 1990s and on to the current refugee crisis,
encountering the shades of history, sometimes figuratively and
sometimes - such as Joan of Arc, sitting pertly in the back of the
van - quite literally. As she roadtrips through 10,000 years of
civilization, watching humanity repeat itself with wars over
borderlines and exceed itself with the creation of timeless art,
the writer begins to reckon with the very worst and the very best
in our collective natures - and it is in seeing the beauty beside
the ugliness, the light among the trees, that she begins to see,
finally, a way for her to go home.
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