John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920-37 Vol 2 by Robert Skidelsky

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan  (9)  £15.00

John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman by Robert Skidelsky  (1)  £14.00

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Robert Skidelsky completes his monumental three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes with Fighting for Britain: 1937-1946. "We threw good housekeeping to the winds. But we saved ourselves and helped save the world". So Keynes is supposed to have described how the battling British won the economic war against the Axis powers. This volume of Lord Skidelsky's biography describes in full how the greatest economic mind of the 20th century volunteered his services during the Second World War. Having been rebuffed by the Treasury for most of the 1930s, Keynes' principal idea--using the Budget as a tool to regulate investment and consumer demand--came of age during the war years. Historians have often seen this sea-change in British economic policy as a case of needs must, but Skidelsky brings out the pivotal role Keynes himself played in winning over the politicians (especially the Labour Party) and the men in grey suits in Whitehall (some of whom turned out to be old chums from Cambridge days--which helped). But Skidelsky also provides accessible chapter and verse on Keynes' negotiations with the Americans over Lend-Lease in 1941-2, and over the contraction of the so-called "sterling area" of the British imperial economy at the end of the war. Keynes liked to think that ideas converted politicians, but the evidence here suggests blood, sweat and tears, all of which no doubt played a part in Keynes' premature demise. We also get vivid accounts of Keynes the don and the man of letters: sorting out college finances, advising on theatre, opera and ballet, dabbling in the history of political economy. A fittingly comprehensive account of the final years of a multi-talented man. --Miles Taylor

Book Jacket
"Keynes was a magical figure and it is fitting that he should have left a magical work".

This is the eagerly awaited third, and final, volume of Robert Skidelsky's definitive and consummate biography of John Maynard Keynes. It is the culmination of a remarkable work dealing with the life and influences of a passionate visionary who finally succeeded in achieving respectability and acceptance on his own terms, not those of a British establishment usually mistrustful of men of ideas.

Dealing with the period from 1937, when Keynes had become the most famous economist and one of the most famous figures on Britain, to his death in 1946, Volume III focuses on Keynes' outstanding contributions to the financing of Britain's war effort to the building of the post-war economic order, and on his role in the "other war"--Britain's struggle to preserve its independence within the Atlantic Alliance, which took him on six wearing and often acrimonious missions to the United States.

Fighting for Britain opens in the twilight years between peace and war and draws a political parallel between Keynes' own health and that of contemporary capitalism. Keynes' physical condition was, like his reputation, on a knife edge. Suffering from heart disease, he spent nearly two years as a semi-invalid. But it was during this period that he showed how his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was not just an anti-depression theory, but could be turned into a powerful intellectual engine of war finance.

The culmination of these efforts was his famous anti-inflationist tract How to Pay for the War, the logic of which, and supporting national income accounts, was accepted as the basis of Kingsley Wood's budget of 1941. For the rest of his life Keynes was involved in difficult financial negotiations with the Americans, first to establish conditions of American help to Britain, then to devise a post-war financial system which satisfied American requirements without sacrificing Britain's interests, and finally, and most traumatically, to get Britain a loan to tide it over the first post-war years. When he died in 1946, Lionel Robbins wrote, "He gave his life for his country, as surely as if he had fallen on the field of battle".

Skidelsky at all times is utterly lucid in his treatment of his subject, both in explaining Keynes' ideas and in picking his way through the complexities of his personality. The book abounds in good stories and memorable portraits, notably that of his devoted wife, Lydia Lopokova, whose eccentric but utterly logical "post-Keynsian" existence is charted in a delightful epilogue, and of his flamboyant medical adviser, Janos Pesch.

Insightful and intelligent, this is a work that tells the story of one of the most important and fascinating men of this century and provides an invaluable overview of matters that remain at the centre of political and economic discussion.

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