John Maynard Keynes: transforming global economy while reading Virginia Woolf

To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is synonymous with bogus spending on public works, insouciance in the face of mounting debt and, of course, homosexual promiscuity. It’s a virtue of Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography that it makes clear how much this under-reads him.

So far from being the flippant old queer calumniated by Niall Ferguson, Keynes worried himself sick about inflation and was far more alarmed by budget deficits than George Osborne seems to be. He was essentially a Nonconformist Liberal for whom faith was impossible, and who saw liberalism as something needing saving from itself.

He was also, as Davenport-Hines reminds us, surely the best writer economics has ever produced: ‘the dark forces of time and ignorance’, ‘animal spirits’ that transcend mere ‘quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities’; ‘It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens’; ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’.