Fifty years ago (when I was a very young scholar), I was asked to write an essay review of some recently published books about the Huxleys. None of them in my view, including Julian Huxley’s own volume of Memories (1970), did justice to their subjects’ scientific achievements and social concerns. Half a century later we now have Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family. It has most definitely been worth the wait. Indeed this work is the crowning achievement of her distinguished career.

Instead of producing a densely argued monograph for her academic peers, the Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales has written a highly accessible and entertaining overview of Thomas Henry Huxley’s and his grandson Julian’s efforts to propagate Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas over a span of 150 years. In this endeavour, Bashford’s intent to bring the fruits of her scholarship to a wider public echoes the Huxleys’ motivation to educate lay readers about the wonder and importance of evolutionary science. Fortunately, she has also heeded the advice that H.G. Wells gave to Julian Huxley when writing for a reader ‘who is just as intelligent as you are (but does not possess your store of knowledge)’. After all, said Wells, everyone from Shakespeare to Darwin wrote for such a reader. That’s a high bar but one which Bashford clears on every page of this engaging work.

It’s just as well she is such a fine stylist, because the complex ideas she discusses and her novel framework for approaching them, demand that they should (following Einstein) be presented as simply as possible – and no simpler. For Bashford has set herself the challenge of chronicling nothing less than the shared and shifting context of biological and social thought from the birth of Thomas Henry Huxley (THH) in 1825 to the death of his grandson in 1975. Combining her expertise as a biographer and an historian of the biological and human sciences, Bashford uses the family history of the Huxleys to double ‘as an account of evolving ideas about generations and genealogy, genes and eugenics’.