cover image Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography

Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography

Donald E. Moggridge, D. E. Moggridge. Routledge, $200 (992pp) ISBN 978-0-415-05141-5

This lengthy, plodding biography is for economists, historians and other specialists and will daunt the general reader. The book draws heavily on John Maynard Keynes's 30-volume Collected Writings , which Moggridge edited, to paint a rounded picture of the English economist as monetary theorist, journalist, negotiator, confidant of politicians, diplomat, friend of the Bloomsbury circle, investor and arts administrator. An economics professor at the University of Toronto, Moggridge explains how Keynes (1883-1946) belatedly came to economics through philosophy, explores Keynes's intuitive working out of his ideas, and reviews his impact as a shaper of British financial policy and an architect of the postwar international monetary system. Keynes's marriage to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova and his many homosexual affairs are cursorily covered in a workmanlike, massively detailed biography from which the inner man is largely absent. Photos. (July)