ABSTRACT
Keynes was born in Cambridge, where his father, John Neville Keynes, was a university lecturer in political economy. After Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes took the civil service exam. Working as a civil servant in the India Office (1906-8) he found intellectual stimulation and friendship in the Bloomsbury Group. In 1908 he returned to King’s Cambridge as an economics lecturer and became editor of the Economic Journal and secretary of the Royal Economic Society
In 1915 he joined the Treasury, working on overseas finances, and in 1919 became a member of the British delegation at Versailles. Disillusioned at what he regarded as the out-manoeuvring of Woodrow Wilson by Clemenceau and Lloyd George and regarding the prospect of heavy German reparations as a recipe for European political and economic disaster, he resigned and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace which turned him into an overnight celebrity
Keynes later mended his fences with Lloyd George and championed his public works programmes of 1929 and 1935. However, this partnership worked to the former’s disadvantage for such was the mistrust of Lloyd George within governing circles by this time that the association militated against acceptance of Keynes’s other proposals.
