Laura Beatty

Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher

Looking for Theophrastus

Pollard

Een Londense vrouw doet onderzoek naar het leven van een sterke, puriteinse vrouw die tijdens de Engelse burgeroorlog in 1643 zelf haar kasteel moet verdedigen.

Darkling

POLLARD is a tour de force - an astonishing first novel which is tough, rough and beautiful.

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.

Lost Property

H. E. Bates

Agnes Miller Parker

Breathes life into the changing character of a single woodland year, describing its shifting seasonal moods from one April to the next, and revealing how precious the woods are to the English countryside, not only for plants and animals, but people.

Through the Woods

To fifteen-year-old Anne the woods that lie beyond her house are a temporary refuge from her noisy, chaotic family, until one day she gathers her courage and steps into the woods, never to return. Slowly, she makes a new life for herself, learning to forage and to hunt, to build a house from the bounty of the woods and to listen to the voices of the trees. As she endures her first, terrible winter she develops the strength of character that will carry her through the dangers of her unconventional life and the bitter beauty of falling in love, but as the outside world encroaches on her secret existence Anne faces a terrible tragedy.

Anne Boleyn was beautiful, gifted and clever. As a teenager, when she arrived at the English court after completing her education in France, she soon caught the eye of King Henry VIII. Henry wooed Anne with passionate love letters and finally, after a great struggle, was allowed to marry her, having secured a divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Love soon turned sour however, as Anne realised that all her husband wanted from her was a son and heir. The birth of Elizabeth, the future queen, in 1533, was a disaster and the consequences for Anne were deadly.

The Wife who Lost Her Head

Anne Boleyn

As a teenager, Anne Boleyn caught the eye of King Henry VIII. He wooed her with passionate love letters and finally married her. Love soon turned sour, however, as Anne realized that all her husband wanted from her was a son and heir. The birth of a daughter was a disaster for Anne.

The Wife Who Lost Her Head

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.

Laura Beatty

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