Laura Beatty

"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...

Standing on the deck of a ferry boat, Laura Beatty watches as the assembled port and buildings of mainland Greece disappear from view. Her destination is Lesbos, but she's not only travelling across the stretch of glittering blue sea—she's also travelling 2,000 years into the past, to a time when the world was a wild place of gods and warrior...

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...