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.
A vivid account of a family at the heart of some of the great
cultural shifts of the modern era ... a masterpiece of
biography.
*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.
*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 World*
Superbly 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.
*BBC History Magazine*
A patient, sympathetic portrait of a family riven with flaws.
*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.
*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.
*Financial Times*
Lucid, lively and addictive ... a panoramic view of an era of
extraordinary and accelerated change ... a celebration of
intellectual bravery.
*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*
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