Saturday, June 19, 2010

My hero / John Maynard Keynes by Joan Bakewell


J M Keynes by Roger Fry
Detail from a portrait of John Maynard Keynes by Roger Fry. Photograph: Bridgeman Art Library

My hero John Maynard Keynes

by Joan Bakewell

'He went out of fashion when the monetarists held sway, so it was good to see Keynesianism back as the only way to get us out of the credit crisis of 2007/08'

Joan Bakewell
Sat 19 Jun 2010 00.06 BST

When I arrived at Cambridge to read economics in the 1950s one of the first things I did was to join the Marshall Society. Alfred Marshall had founded the Cambridge School of Economics, and its influence was everywhere. Keynes had followed him, and by then his economic theories were in the ascendant, and were to remain so until 1979. I persist in believing they were right.

Keynes was a man of prodigious intellectual gifts, who straddled the worlds of banking, politics, the City, journalism and the arts, playing a significant role in all of them. But that doesn't express the nub of his attitude to the world and to human behaviour. What I admire is his belief in the moral responsibility of society towards its members, an attitude he brought to bear on his economic theories. His 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, rightly predicted that the revenge-crazed impulse among the victors to extract punitive reparations from Germany would have disastrous consequences. He believed the untempered operation of the free markets needed to be moderated by intervention. He went out of fashion when the monetarists held sway, so it was good to see Keynesianism back as the only way to get us out of the credit crisis of 2007/08. Now, as we hover on the brink of the coalition's precipitous cuts, there's no better time to consider his wisdom.

But it is the rounded man I admire most: a member of the Bloomsbury set, he managed to outrage them all – including former lovers (male) – by marrying Lydia Lopokova, a star of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He loved the arts and did loads to help them, creating the Arts Council of Great Britain, and seeing to the financial wellbeing of Sadler's Wells, the Royal Opera House and King's College, Cambridge. He made money as a speculator and used it to buy paintings – Cézanne, Braque, Picasso. All this and he managed to be nice, too – witty and always warm hearted. His arch enemy Hayek called him "the only really great man I ever knew." We need more like him.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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