How Left was he?

Paul Addison

  • John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937 by Robert Skidelsky
    Macmillan, 731 pp, £20.00, November 1992, ISBN 0 333 37138 0
  • Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography by D.E. Moggridge
    Routledge, 941 pp, £35.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 415 05141 X

John Maynard Keynes is famous for his private life and associations with Bloomsbury and famous, too, as the economist who campaigned for public works between the wars, and revolutionised economics with his General Theory. A biographer of Keynes has to straddle two very different worlds, and it is one measure of Robert Skidelsky’s achievement that he writes with equal authority of both in this deeply researched and densely textured book. But what marks out his work as truly masterly is his portrayal of the interplay between the private and the public in Keynes, the tensions between the two, and the dynamism released by the growing fusion between the two halves of his nature.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions