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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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UNIVERSAL MAN

Richard Davenport-Hines

The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes

The first biography of John Maynard Keynes that looks at the man behind the economist who has fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern economics and policies. THE UNIVERSAL MAN highlights how Keynes’ ardent curiosity, knowledge and imagination directed at every aspect of humanity fashioned the sort of economist he became.
THE UNIVERSAL MAN: THE SEVEN LIVES OF JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES is a fun, fascinating and exhaustive account of Keynes’ life. It shows how the same fundamental values, skills, and personal qualities were at work through the many different incarnations of his genius:

>the Boy Proidgal: A lanky man in his twenties in Cambridge, among a secretive discussion group, laying the groundwork for a universal way of living the good life, while socialising amongst the glamorous Bloomsbury set. A man of thirty, perched in the precarious side-car on 3 August 1914, on his way to single-handedly avert financial panic and monetary disarray in the first week of the war.

> the Lover and Connoisseur: A promiscuous homosexual, pioneering conservationist, opera-lover.

>The Public Man: A man in his fifties publishing in 1936 the most important economics book of the 20th century.

> The dauntless man in his sixties, with weak heart, fighting daily, at interminable conferences in Washington DC, to save war-wrecked Britain from being driven into bankruptcy by the Americans, knowing that he is sacrificing his life in the effort, until one day he collapses.

Richard Davenport-Hines creates a colourful portrait of a man Leonard Woolf described as ‘a don, a civil servant, a speculator, a businessman, a journalist, a writer, a farmer, a picture-dealer, a statesman, a theatrical manager, a book collector, and half a dozen other things’. Woolf did not use the word ‘economist’ to characterise Keynes: nor does the word occur in this book.
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Book

Published 2015-03-01 by HarperCollins

Book

Published 2015-03-01 by HarperCollins

Comments

...Davenport-Hines brilliantly conveys what one might call the peripheral atmospherics of Keynes’s existence...

Sprightly…highly enjoyable… Above all, Davenport-Hines sells his title and his proposition: Keynes is about much more than borrowing and spending, deficits and interest rates and in order to understand his economics one has to understand the man and his times.

An amusing, elegant and provocative writer…great fun. By focusing on Keynes as a private man and public figure rather than an academic economist, it is possible to see him as the last and greatest flowering of Edwardian Liberalism.

Richard Davenport Hines’ portrait of Keynes is as vivid as fresh paint. You can see the genius of many parts dashing to Number Ten Downing Street or dancing a jig with Lydia. It’s wonderful.

A treat… We read endlessly about Keynes the economist. But he was so much more and this unputdownable book explores not so much Keynes the economist as much as Keynes the man.

Davenport-Hines is good at evoking the collision of the new and the libertine with the old and the repressed… thoughtful and serious… For the reader already acquainted with the economics, or indeed not especially interested, there is a lot of fun to be had in this book.

[A] first-class book, which I cannot praise highly enough… Keynes possessed a largeness of mind that one can only call noble and a generosity of spirit that was truly princely. This admirable book does him justice.

US: Basic Books (May 2015); China: PHEI ; Taiwan: Briefing Press

With wit and grace...the author looks at Keynes in seven distinct but overlapping guises... It is always, in Davenport-Hines’ hands, a story told in an incisive and thoughtful way… The book convey its own vision of this wholly extraordinary and undeniably idiosyncratic figure with persuasive artistry and conviction.

Lively, funny, original, and beautifully written.

...This book should attract a wide, admiring audience.

Succinct, lively and well-written biography…