John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, also made a unique contribution to public affairs and to Britain's cultural life. Drawing on an unrivalled knowledge of Keynes, gained from twenty years' editing of his papers, D.E. Moggridge has taken a fresh and revealing look at the man and his achievements. He discusses Keynes's deep roots in the Victorian Cambridge of Henry Sedgewick and Alfred Marshall and his conventional education at Eton and Cambridge before moving him out into the wider world. Before 1914 this world included not only official service in the India Office (1906-8) before his return to King's College Cambridge as a don, but also membership of a royal commission and the editorship of the Economic Journal before he was 30. These were also the years when, though Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant, Keynes established his lifelong links with the Bloomsbury Group.

The First World War carried Keynes further into Whitehall, where he became the civil servant responsible for Britain's external finances and, with the Armistice, the Treasury's senior representative at the Paris Peace Conference. Disillusioned by the Peace Treaty and deeply ashamed of his own role at the Conference he resigned from the Treasury in 1919 to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, one of the most successful polemics of the century. Keynes was never again just a don. He was a substantial and influential figure in the worlds of finance and public affairs, as well as an increasingly important one in the arts.

Professor Moggridge traces Keynes's career on all its levels, paying particular attention to the role of Lydia Lopokova, the Russian ballerina, whom he married in 1925. She provided Keynes with the stability that took him from being a successful academic economist and polemicist to creating two pioneering works of economic theory, A Treatise on Money (1930) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Although laid low by a severe heart attack in 1937, Keynes went on to play important and revolutionary roles in Second World War Whitehall.

With its careful documentation of all aspects of Keynes's life, its intimate knowledge of its subject and his many worlds, this biography establishes a new benchmark in the study of Keynes. Indispensable for economists and historians, it is also invaluable for those with an interest in the creation of ideas and institutions that are still prominent in the late twentieth century.