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 *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 *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 WorldSuperbly original and evocatively stylish … Bashford has ingeniously created a loosely chronological account that weaves their own lives and experiences within ever-shifting attitudes towards evolution. – Patricia Fara * BBC History Magazine *A patient, sympathetic portrait of a family riven with flaws. – AN Wilson * Spectator *A detailed, nuanced, and superbly written joint biography of the intellectual lineage of the Huxleys … rich and compelling … Bashford elegantly reminds us that science has never banished the sacred for the secular, the irrational for the logical. Rather, it creates opportunities for new syntheses, new configurations of life, mind, soul, body, nature, and society. – Philip Ball * The Lancet *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 *Lucid, lively and addictive … a panoramic view of an era of extraordinary and accelerated change … a celebration of intellectual bravery. – Morag Fraser * Inside Story *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

Alison Bashford is Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. Bashford was previously Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. She is Fellow of the British Academy, the Australian Academy of Humanities and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2020 she was awarded the Royal Society (NSW) History and Philosophy of Science Medal for transformative historical studies of the biomedical and environmental sciences. In 2021 she was awarded the Dan David Prize for scholarship in the history of medicine.