Randal Keynes Writer
Randal Hume Keynes, OBE, FLS (/ˈkeɪnz/ KAYNZ; born July 29, 1948) is a British conservationist, author and great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He is the author of the intimate exploration of his famous ancestry, Annie's Box, subtitled Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (2001), a book about the relationship between Darwin and his daughter Annie, whose early death deeply affected him.He has taken a leading role in the campaign to have Down House, Darwin's former home, designated a World Heritage Site.Educated at Marlborough College & New College Oxford.Keynes is the son of the Hon. Anne Pinsent (née Adrian) and physiologist Richard Keynes. He is the great-nephew of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the brother of the Cambridge Professors Simon Keynes (Historian), and Roger Keynes (Medical Scientist) whose daughter – Keynes’s niece – is the Catholic writer and apologist Laura Keynes. He is the grandson of the surgeon Geoffrey Keynes, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian, and Hester Adrian, Baroness Adrian.Keynes’s son, Skandar (born 1991), is an actor best known for his role as Edmund Pevensie in the Narnia films. He also has a daughter, Soumaya Keynes (born 1989), who has appeared in various productions for BBC Radio 4.He is a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association.He campaigned successfully against the redevelopment of Kings Cross Station and for the preservation of the Caledonian Road neighbourhood in central London. He recalls one of the turning points as his persuasion of two members of the House of Lords to ask the government to guarantee the funding of the project; when the ministers declined to, the bill fell.He was the author of two Oxford National Dictionary of Biography articles on Anne Darwin and Wiiliam Darwin in 2005.
