A strange, wild, brilliant personal journey - across land and through time - in which Laura Beatty travels back two thousand years to rescue from obscurity Aristotle's friend and Chaucer's inspiration, the forgotten philosopher who grandfathered botany and the English novel.

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 kings. It's here she
needs to go to retrieve a forgotten philosopher, one who worked side-by-side with Aristotle to learn and to classify the
world, to rely on his senses rather than myth to explain what governs the seasons and the soil, to put down on parchment
the glorious multiplicity of character types he met on his travels across ancient Greece.
That philosopher is Theophrastus, a gentle, peaceful, wondering man whose work took him from the academies of Athens
to the reckless court of Philip of Macedonia, and in time would would inspire Linnaeus' system of classification and, quite
possibly, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - and the modern form of the novel that the Tales, in turn inspired. But if one person
achieved so much, why is his name so little recognised? In Looking for Theophrastus, Laura Beatty restores this important
figure to collective consciousness, and in doing so travels in Theophrastus's own footsteps, exploring how we see, receive
and relate to the world around us and questioning what we lose from the modern way of living when we forget those
ancients who first taught us how to see.