The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

In his early twenties, poor, racked with depression, becalmed in the Coral Sea on the seemingly endless survey mission of HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with Henrietta Heathorn, a young Englishwoman in Sydney, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet he would return to London, become one of the most famous scientists of the age and marry Henrietta. They would create a great intellectual dynasty. The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves. In innumerable fields observing both nature and culture, they worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and – perhaps above all – as public lecturers, educators and explainers. Their speciality was evolution in all its forms – at the grandest level of species, deep time, the Earth, and at the most personal and intimate.