Portrait of a traveller

A dazzling new biography of George Forster, the 18th-century naturalist, philosopher and revolutionary, is due to be published this week (2 June).

In The Traveller, Andrea Wulf, author of the best-selling The Invention of Nature, brings to life a major European figure who straddled the boundary between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and was celebrated across Europe from London to St Petersburg.

It was Forster’s account of James Cooks’s second expedition A Voyage Round the World (1777) that made him famous. His life was short – he died at the age of 39, an exile in Paris – but his travels fostered in him a deep belief in the equality of races, and his thinking about the natural world and politics.

Andrea is appearing at the Festival on Friday 23 October.