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A persuasive new biography argues that it was Blair and Clinton who finally ended JM Keynes’s dream of a fairer life for all
John Maynard Keynes lived through two world wars as well as the great depression between them, and as an economic adviser to British and American governments did his best to fend off political disaster. But Zachary Carter’s solid, sombre intellectual biography begins at a moment when Keynes himself, in his private capacity, seemed to be causing a seismic upset. “The Universe totters,” Lytton Strachey informed his cronies in the Bloomsbury set in 1922: the cataclysm had happened because Keynes – whose previous lovers, conscientiously indexed in his archives, were a troupe of nameless men, among them “the shoemaker of the Hague” and “the clergyman” – had taken up with a woman, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.
By starting with this salacious titbit, Carter enticingly sexes up a book that soon settles down, as Keynes did, to be grimly serious. When he married Lopokova, Keynes gave up the sportive pursuit known in Bloomsbury as “buggery” and, as he saltily put it, relished being “foxed and gobbled” by his wife. Cultivating what he called “a disgusting and financial state of mind”, he became a public man so loftily impersonal that in an obituary in 1946 his former adversary Lionel Robbins called him “God-like”. Continue reading...