Volume 49, Number 4 · March 14, 2002
Keynes's Last Stand
By Alan Ryan
John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946
by Robert Skidelsky
Viking, 580 pp., $34.95
The third and last volume of Robert Skidelsky's wonderful, engrossing biography of John Maynard Keynes is a triumph over its raw material. It covers the last decade of Keynes's life—1937 to 1946. By 1937, Keynes, who was born in 1883, was a very sick man. The heart infection which was to kill him in 1946 was well established, and incurable. The backdrop against which the events of this last volume are played out is one of remorseless physical decline; mentally, he remained as sharply imaginative as ever until a few months before his death. Indeed, ill as he was, the ministrations of his wife and doctor ensured that even in the narrowest physical sense he survived the stresses of wartime better than most of his colleagues at the Treasury and the Bank of England. But his achievements were the achievements of a dying man.
Review, 6323 words
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