An Intimate History of Evolution

A vivid account of a family at the heart of some of the great cultural shifts of the modern era ... a masterpiece of biography. -- John Gray * New Statesman * A deeply researched biography of Thomas Henry, Julian, and the wider Huxley family, the result of close examination of their writings and correspondence, it also serves as an intellectual history of Britain through the radical shifts in science and society that gave birth to modernity ... The whole of British intellectual life seems accessible through some branch of this sprawling family tree. -- Stephen Buranyi * The Guardian * Ambitious, scholarly ... a biography of ideas, using one family's history to explore the development of theories about generations, genealogy and genes, chronicling shifting attitudes to religion, race, women and animal experimentation - from morphology to ethology. -- Annalena McAfee * Financial Times * The Huxleys wrote about evolution as a romance, an epic of progress and transformation. In their own lives and observations they also saw the cruelty of science and the bleaker aspects of inheritance ... Both sides, and both men, are painstakingly illuminated by Ms Bashford. Balancing scholarly rigour with an eye for the absurd, her book reveals the human drama behind scientific fact. * The Economist * What a family, what a story, and so cleverly told. Alison Bashford constructs a narrative that intertwines the lives of four generations of Huxleys, boldly forgoing traditional chronology for illuminating synthesis. Absolutely fascinating. -- Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World Over three generations, the extraordinary Huxley family have changed and reshaped the way we see ourselves. Now Alison Bashford has written a fascinating book that links T H Huxley, the great Victorian scientist with a Caribbean-born wife, to their remarkable grandchildren, Aldous and Julian, in a way that shows how the family struggled with depression and even lunacy while emphasising the crucial role played by the wives, sisters and daughters of these strange and brilliant men. It's a wonderful and important story, one that held me enthralled from start to end. -- Miranda Seymour I was captivated from beginning to end by the richness of the detail, the flaws and all personal biographies and most of all blown away by the intimate narrative of how the biggest science stories of the age had a Huxley as ringmaster or provocateur at their heart. -- Tim Smit Full of surprises on every page, this book makes you wonder why all history can't have the engaging intimacy of a novel. Bashford brilliantly marries intellectual history with the story of four generations of a great family in a literary tour de force. -- Professor Jim Secord, author of Visions of Science Packed with insights into the brilliance of three generations of the Huxley family, Bashford's book tells a magnificent story about the huge personalities and shortcomings that propelled evolutionary science and much else besides. Male and female, from Victorian patriarch to zoo director, authors, lovers, and poets: the pages dance with accounts of contemporary literature, psychology, politics, anthropology, religion, and art. -- Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: A Biography and The Quotable Darwin A scholarly study of T. H. Huxley and his grandson [and a] guide to the history of evolutionary thinking... it's impressive that Bashford can command both these types of writing with equal authority. -- Stefan Collini * London Review of Books * Bashford has crafted a masterful biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, patriarch of an evolutionary dynasty, his inheritor and grandson Julian, and the families that sustained them. Interweaving their public contributions to science and private poems, she deftly charts a generational quest to understand and articulate the human condition. -- Erika Lorraine Milam, author of Creatures of Cain Alison Bashford's intimate story of the Huxley clan reveals the ambiguities that arise if we apply modern values to past heroes. Here science, society and personalities interact to bring the past alive. -- Peter Bowler, author of Progress Unchained: Ideas of Evolution, Human History and the Future A patient, sympathetic portrait of a family riven with flaws. -- AN Wilson * Spectator *