Volume 31, Number 12 · July 19, 1984
Portrait of a Genius as a Young Man
By Noel Annan
John Maynard Keynes: 'New Wisdom for a New Age'
by John Kenneth Galbraith, by Roy Jenkins, by Richard Wainwright, edited by Andrew Duff
Cambridge Liberal Association, 36 pp., £3.00 (paper)
John Maynard Keynes Vol. I: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920
by Robert Skidelsky
Macmillan (London), 447 pp., £14.95
John Maynard Keynes: A Personal Biography of the Man Who Revolutionized Capitalism and the Way We Live
by Charles H. Hession
Macmillan, 400 pp., $22.95
Lydia Lopokova
edited by Milo Keynes
St. Martin's Press, 238 pp., $25.00
Last year the centenary of Keynes's birth was celebrated in Cambridge, England, in almost too seemly a manner. A meeting at the Guildhall (where long ago Keynes's mother had presided as mayor) turned out to be a decorous exercise in body-snatching. John Kenneth Galbraith denounced monetarists and suggested that the saint's relics and truest disciples were really to be found in Cambridge, Massachusetts; a Liberal member of Parliament pounced on Keynes's loyalty to that party and duly appropriated him; and in the most engaging speech Roy Jenkins trounced the Conservative and Labour parties by quoting Keynes on their dispiriting defects and claimed him for the Alliance of Liberals and Social Democrats which Jenkins himself had created. Meanwhile King's College conducted an awe-inspiring international seminar of over a hundred economists that concluded with a dinner for them and some descendants of extended Bloomsbury at which two short speeches by octogenarians were followed by one of fifty-three minutes by a Nobel Prizeman, after which the diners tottered into the dusk punch-drunk with oratory. Keynes would have tolerated the oratory: he had listened to so many speeches in his lifetime. But the feature he would most have enjoyed was the musical divertissement about him and his Bloomsbury friends in the spirit of Walton's Façade, composed, played, and sung by undergraduates.
Review, 7166 words
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