Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, wrote essays that are still models of style. Einstein's champion Sir Arthur Eddington wrote beautifully about the far cosmos more than five decades ago. After a period in which books about science went out of fashion, Stephen Jay Gould in the US and Stephen Hawking in Britain showed publishers a thing or two about sales and profits - and good reviews. Nor is it suprising that science writing is consistent with good writing. This is one reason why, say, Edward O Wilson in his autobiography, Naturalist, writes stuff that makes the scalp prickle.
Most scientists are what they are because they find the world astonishing, and wonderful.
It doesn't trouble him that his audience is spellbound. The story he has to tell is a spell-binder. Thirty-three years ago when the Beatles arrived, cosmology was a bit of a jokey subject. First there was speculation, went the joke, then wild speculation, then cosmology. The past and the future of the universe were ideas you could toy with, but you couldn't prove anything.