In search of the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus

Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a personal, often confessional, counterpoint. The ostensible subject of Laura Beatty’s book is the pioneering Greek botanist and philosopher Theophrastus. He was a friend of Aristotle’s, and was once thought his intellectual equal, but is now little known except to a few classicists and historians of science. But since no one wants to publish a straight book on Theophrastus, we get instead a book that is at least as much about Laura Beatty, her library researches, her travels in Greece and her kitchen garden.

Her publishers describe the book as ‘genre-defying’. But the genre lines can be blurred only so often before we have simply created a new genre, with all the clichés that come with it: how Middlemarch cured my midlife crisis, retracing Nietzsche’s morning walks, what Mrs Gaskell taught me about love… you know the sort of thing.