A man for all seasons

Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes. By Richard Davenport-Hines. Basic Books; 416 pages; $28.99. William Collins; £18.99.

A BIOGRAPHY of John Maynard Keynes without the economics may seem like “Hamlet” without the prince. But Richard Davenport-Hines has set out to write such a book, and the result is utterly absorbing. His argument is that Keynes deserves to be remembered for much else besides his economic works: in addition to being an economist, the great man was also a boy genius, a civil servant, a national opinion-shaper, a lover, a connoisseur and aesthete, and a statesman. Indeed Keynes himself wrote: “The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts…He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree.”