John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937

In the first volume of his towering biography of Britain's greatest economist, Robert Skidelsky gave a frank and detailed exposition of how John Maynard Keynes came to concern himself with the practical problems of his age and exert a profound influence upon them. In this eagerly awaited second volume, the highly praised biographer takes up the story after the controversial publication of Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

The First World War had destroyed the essential props of the international economic and political system. There was to be no sustained recovery, but a slide into economic depression, the rise of totalitarianism, and another huge-scale war. Setting Keynes and his ideas firmly in context, Skidelsky shows the importance of world events in shaping his life, and provides stringent analysis of the economist's concentrated assault on conventional fiscal wisdom: his attacks on reparations policy and the return to the pre-war gold standard, but above all, his formation of a new economic philosophy.

The rarefied Bloomsbury world in which Keynes had been involved was irrelevant in the postwar world. Keynes could not remain there if he was to launch a revolution in economic statesmanship. His marriage in 1925 to Diaghilev's Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova shocked Bloomsbury, who saw it as a rejection of all they stood for. Skidelsky shows with sympathy and insight how essential this marriage was to his public work.

Skidelsky's skilful and illuminating interweaving of Keynes's public and private lives, the quality of his research and his sensitivity to the subject make this biography an essential read. It is the story of a complex and richly talented man who set out to save liberal capitalist civilisation from the perils of communism and dictatorship. His legacy was not just an economic theory but a theory of government. Both are as hotly disputed today as when he first propounded them.