Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

With Keynes once again in ascendance thanks to the Great Recession, this gracefully written biography gives lay readers a chance to reacquaint themselves with the man whose theories were behind TARP and quantitative easing. Davenport-Hines (An English Affair) divides the book into seven personality aspects or “snapshots,” capturing Keynes’s complexity but making it more difficult to appreciate him in the whole. Keynes’s economic theories receive particularly short shrift. On the other hand, fascinating personal details emerge, such as Keynes’s abhorrence of bitten fingernails, which for him sullied even such an eminence as the poet W.H. Auden: “All other impressions [are] so favourable, but those horrid fingers cannot lie.” Readers familiar with Keynes’s marriage to a Russian ballerina may be surprised to learn that he originally, and predominantly, favored men, cataloguing his casual pickups on long lists. Indirectly, Davenport-Hines’s focus on Keynes as a human being offers some insight into Keynes as an economist, suggesting that his universality, as well as personal warmth and humanism, informed his belief that both government and the free market had economic roles to play, and that the love of money was, in itself, “a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” This is a delightful, detailed portrait, rich in interesting anecdote and encompassing the entire roster of Keynes’s accomplishments. (May)