The seeds of the LSD trip were planted a year earlier, in the summer of 1955. Aldous Huxley, recently widowed and struggling with his grief, came to stay with Matthew and Ellen.

Although the book centres on Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) and Julian Huxley (1887-1975), the family dynasty includes other notable figures: Aldous Huxley, author of the famous dystopian novel ...

As Alison Bashford notes in her biography of the Huxleys, “It was a family tradition so to argue.” All three of the most publicly influential Huxleys – Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) and his grandsons ...

She gives due attention to other members of the dynasty: the novelists Mary Ward and Aldous Huxley, Julian’s younger half-brother Andrew (a biophysician and Nobel laureate), Julian’s ...

Francis Huxley (left), Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley, 1954. (Courtesy Francis Huxley Archives) Yet the questions raised by that evening in Connecticut still resonate.