Keynes

Life&Times
By Robert Cord

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles. A part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, and close friends with Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, he combined his revolutionary economic work with sponsorship of the arts, being a founder and first chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and a very successful career as a stock-market speculator. By the time of his death at the age of 63 in 1946, he was the most influential economist in the world.
Keynesianism was arguably the great economic theory of the 20th century, a particular style of capitalism that argued that the economy was determined by aggregate demand. The subsequent history of economics can be seen as varying responses to or criticisms of, Keynes’s ideas, particularly the new economic models proposed by monetarists such as Freidman and Hayek.
 

 ‘Robert Cord . . . provides a thoroughly readable account, written in a lively style and, perhaps uniquely among accounts of Keynes, using colour, numerous photographs, a chronological table and numerous inserts to explain people and ideas without disrupting the main narrative . . .Specialists will question some of the judgments made but that is, perhaps, to miss the point, which is to stimulate interest in a remarkable figure about whose life many people would otherwise remain ignorant.’
Times Higher Education Supplement

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Robert Cord is a Keynes specialist, with an additional interest in the lives and works of the Bloomsbury Group. He is currently based at Cambridge University.