For the author, Keynes was 'England's paramount example of the scholar as man of action', and these actions are the focus of the book. He presents the young Cambridge don emerging as an activist in the second decade of the twentieth century. Initially, he appears on the periphery of British politics as a member of the Royal Commission into Indian Finance and Currency (he had had a brief and unhappy stint at the India Office), which was 'his first experience of being a professional economist exercising his influence on public affairs'. Then, at the very heart of politics he has a decisive intervention with the chancellor, Lloyd George, over the financial crisis that hit the City of London with the advent of the Great War. Later recruited to the Treasury for the remainder of hostilities, he focuses on war finances. Ultimately, he appears on the world stage as principal Treasury official at the Paris Peace Conference. Disagreeing fundamentally with Allied reparations policy, Keynes resigned from Treasury and penned his best-selling polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

'Davenport-Hines has a novelist's sense of character and writes memorable pen portraits'

The Economic Consequences is 'written with pugnacious verve and brilliant insight to scourge the ignorance, caprices, hypocrisy ... of the Paris delegates' (Davenport-Hines). Embellished with satirical portraits of the Allied leaders, the book made Keynes an international celebrity. There was much tut-tutting that an official should use his inside knowledge for so immediate and scathing an account – 'very indiscreet', 'tactless', 'distasteful', and characterised by a 'persistent pro-German bias ... akin to that of the conscientious objector'. While Davenport-Hines concedes that Keynes was 'too magnanimous' to the Germans, contrasting Versailles favourably with German treatment of Russia at Brest-Litovsk, he will have none of the argument that Keynes's portrayal of a Carthaginian peace occasioned a guilt complex in Britain that led to the appeasement of Hitler. '[I]t was the unpreparedness in land, sea and air weaponry that made appeasement unavoidable after Hitler began a policy of European aggression.'

Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes (photograph by Walter Benington via Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the 'renegade Treasury official' sought to advise, provoke, and persuade governments to rethink old economic truths in the face of recession, stagnation, boom, bust, and depression. The death in 1924 of his mentor, the classical economist Alfred Marshall, 'loosened Keynes's loyalty to the old seer': he readied himself for 'a Newtonian shift from his intellectual inheritance'. The result was the evolution of the Keynesian paradigm with its advocacy of demand management, encouraging states to intervene to reduce the instabilities, inefficiencies, and waste of capitalism. But Davenport-Hines insists Keynes was no revolutionary; he had no quarrel with capitalism as such, only with capitalists 'too muddle-headed to distinguish new measures for safeguarding capitalism from Bolshevism'. Detestation of the inefficiencies of unregulated capitalism warred in Keynes with his dread of proletarian revolution. What Keynes yearned for was to recapture the golden age of his youth, the charm and security of the Edwardian era, of Eton and King's College before the deluge.

'For the author, Keynes was '''England's paramount example of the scholar as man of action'''

There is no doubt that Davenport-Hines enjoyed his exploration of Keynes's love life; it is the most lively chapter in the book, frank and non-judgemental. He indulges in none of the fanciful linkages between Keynes's sexual behaviour and his economic theories that so excite the birdbrains of the twittersphere. Until his forties, Keynes seems to have been a thoroughgoing (if that is the right word) homosexual, with romantic affairs of varying duration with his Eton, Cambridge, Apostle, and Bloomsbury friends. Of these the most significant was with the androgynous bisexual painter, Duncan Grant. When in London, but never apparently in Cambridge, he was given to one-night stands with casual pick-ups at pubs, public baths, or on the streets. A passion for classification – in his youth he was a stamp collector – led him to keep meticulous records of his sexual encounters. And all this within the shadow of the Oscar Wilde tragedy a decade before. Something about Keynes's personality seems to have helped him to avoid blackmail from any of these encounters, however casual. And he remained friends with many of his sexual partners for the rest of his life; indeed, bucolic Charleston in Sussex, where Duncan Grant was involved in a ménage à trois with Vanessa and Clive Bell, was a frequent watering hole.

In his forties he fell in love and married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, in what proved to be a loving and lasting partnership, though sharing a part of their honeymoon with Ludwig Wittgenstein seems a bit odd. Bloomsbury was somewhat askance, probably due to intellectual snobbery, for the delightful Lydia was deliciously silly. Davenport-Hines makes the point that the dancer shared similar sensibilities with the painter Duncan Grant, the great male love of Keynes's life. Both were 'responsive, instinctual, imaginative, sympathetic, astute and unstudied'. He concludes that 'Loppy was the right wife for Keynes'.

'He indulges in none of the fanciful linkages between Keynes's sexual behaviour and his economic theories that so excite the birdbrains of the twittersphere'

The chapter on Keynes as connoisseur covers the breadth of Keynes's aesthetic interests and also includes a ragbag of other issues, making it something of a hodgepodge. There is an essay on Keynes and Bloomsbury, arguably relevant to this facet of Keynes's life, given the Bloomsbury faith in artistic civilisation and Duncan Grant's influence on Keynes as a collector of modern art. The same cannot be said of the accounts of his participation in the governance of King's, nor details of his dining with the great and the good and the clever at several élite dining clubs. Keynes's connoisseurship was multifarious: a perceptive collector of modern painting both for himself and the nation; a discriminating bibliophile; the driving force behind the Cambridge Arts Theatre, built on King's land; the founding chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain; the key figure in the transformation of Covent Garden into the home of the national ballet and opera companies; and an ardent advocate for the preservation of the English countryside.

Though no hagiography, there is little doubt from the first words of this fascinating book that the subject is the biographer's hero; this reaches its apogee in the last chapter. His health 'teetering on a precipice' but driven by his Victorian sense of duty, Keynes criss-crosses the Atlantic in pursuit of an international economic order which would prevent the disorder of the interwar years and, as well, seeking to minimise the repayment of British war debts to the United States. The effort killed him. Yet 'he had done more than any other single person to create the world [of Bretton Woods]'. That world, though much changed, still lives in his shadow. A new generation of readers can ask no better introduction than this vivid portrayal of one of the seminal figures of the last century.