Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes

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Richard Davenport-Hines. Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Also by Richard Davenport-Hines

About the Author

About the Publisher

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G. H. Hardy

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At Eton Keynes continued his family’s process of social betterment by education. What sort of a school was it?

Percy Lubbock, the younger brother of Keynes’s classics tutor and Keynes’s near contemporary at Eton, said that their head master, the Reverend Edmond Warre, educated nobody. Neither ‘his odd jumbled storehouse of a mind’ nor ‘his musing wandering speculating humour’ caught the attention of boys. ‘He brought forth his lore, he quoted the poets, he harangued us upon the grammar of the ancients; but he absolutely lacked the gift of the kindling spark, nothing that he touched ever sprang to fire in his teaching.’ Warre was more voluble than intelligent – ‘a portly dignified John Bullish sort of man’, said Keynes’s future sexual partner George Ives. Keynes was satirical about Warre’s sermons on Sundays, with their mouldy ideas and asinine wordiness. ‘In chapel he stirred nobody,’ agreed Percy Lubbock, ‘he was merely a headmaster doing his duty; he preached as the old head of an old school may be expected to preach, with all his dignity and sonority, with round faces that rolled away to the roof unnoticed till he came to an end.’ Yet perhaps Warre’s conventionality was apt for his audience, for Eton boys were shocked when a colonial bishop, preaching one Whitsunday, mentioned ‘cigarettes’. Daily chapel attendance was obligatory. For Vansittart, the drowsy sermons might have been tolerable if he had not also been plagued by endless divinity papers.25

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