Quotes from Richard Davenport-Hines

had gone to work in Worcester's famous Washburn & Moen barbed wire factory: Swedes were preferred by employers there because, unlike the Irish, they did not tend to get either fighting drunk or unionized.

treaty were lenient compared with those imposed by Germany in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, whereby Russia had been denuded of a third of its population, deprived of half its industrial capacity and nine-tenths of its coal-mines, and subjected to a massive indemnity.

Until the 1980s English Customs officers were instructed to treat any traveller carrying condoms in their luggage as a suspect person, and to search for drugs or other unlawful items.)

Contraception was an issue of women's freedom for Keynes, who also recommended in 1925 that women's pay must be regulated to ensure fairness. It took over forty years for Keynes's pioneering views to be met by legislation: male homosexuality was partially decriminalized and contraception made available to all women under the Sexual Offences and Family Planning Acts of 1967; the injustice of women's low earnings was first addressed in the Equal Pay Act of 1970.73

Keynes had the happiest of marriages, and the best of wives for him, but marital contentment narrowed his outlook and temper.77

One of the library occupants was Lawrence Beesley, a Dulwich College science master seeking new chances in America (his small son grew up to marry Dodie Smith, the author of The 101 Dalmatians).

Connoisseurs need not be aristocratic, but must adopt or reject people and tastes according to a patrician sensibility that ignores the worlds of productivity and profit. Money is esteemed as a means to acquire what they value, but despised as a provider of power, showiness, luxury, over-eating or barbarous hobbies.

The Means to Prosperity articles had momentous impact – not only because the pleasure felt in understanding subtle arguments predisposes people towards accepting their conclusions. The articles sparked international discussions which inaugurated the oncoming Keynesian Revolution.

It is from time to time the duty of a serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself

These virtuosi maintained that whatever has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, is likely to be untrue.

The urge to self-deception, which seemed to Keynes fundamental to untrained and thoughtless people, was what he most resisted. Public opinion he recognized as gullible, uninformed, wayward and super-abundant in misplaced confidence. Improvisations, expedients and thoughtless half-truths led to blunders, as he was to demonstrate in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

party passions led to muddled or dishonest thinking, made people unreasonable or stereotypical, and lacked long-term perspective.

Keynes was patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality.

The central argument, which seemed revolutionary to classical economists, was that the economy had no natural tendency towards full employment.

Our final task', he wrote, 'might be to select those variables which can be deliberately controlled or managed by central authority in the kind of system in which we actually live.