A man for all seasons

Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes. By Richard Davenport-Hines. Basic Books; 416 pages; $28.99. William Collins; £18.99.

A BIOGRAPHY of John Maynard Keynes without the economics may seem like “Hamlet” without the prince. But Richard Davenport-Hines has set out to write such a book, and the result is utterly absorbing. His argument is that Keynes deserves to be remembered for much else besides his economic works: in addition to being an economist, the great man was also a boy genius, a civil servant, a national opinion-shaper, a lover, a connoisseur and aesthete, and a statesman. Indeed Keynes himself wrote: “The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts…He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree.”

Keynes saved Britain from financial ruin at least twice, the author argues: first by preventing calamity at the outbreak of war in 1914 when the City of London’s debt markets ground to a halt, and second by hectoring America to reduce Britain’s second-world-war debts. Partial success allowed the post-war Labour government to fund its welfare state and National Health Service. Keynes’s sagacity and wit shifted public opinion. In magazine articles and on campaign stumps he savaged the Versailles treaty as vindictive and the gold standard as a “barbarous relic”. He backed the...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1zFBrNI