All readers will recognize the heavy debt that my book owes to the scholarship and solicitude that Donald Moggridge has devoted to the writings and activities of John Maynard Keynes. The infallibility of Moggridge’s editorial work on the thirty volumes of Keynes’s papers, and the dedicated, attentive scruples of his Keynes biography, are all the more attractive for being unostentatious. His volumes are indispensable aids. The virtuosity of Robert Skidelsky’s work, and the urbane intelligence of his approach, have been no less important to my work.
My own book is neither milk-and-water Moggridge nor gin-and-bitters Skidelsky. It owes some of its flavour to the writings of Richard Overy, Graham Robb, Richard Roberts, Brendan Simms and Robert Tombs. Stephen Keynes made time to see me and to talk freely when he was beset by other responsibilities. I have profited, too, from suggestions, information and corrections from Michael Bloch, Kevin Bucknell, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, Anne Chisholm, Patric Dickinson (Clarenceux King of Arms), Henry Hardy, Simon Malloch, Philip Mansel, Tom Perrin, James Stourton and Donald Winch. Roger Louis twice invited me to speak at the British Studies seminar in the University of Texas at Austin, and thus enabled me to quarry material in the Harry Ransom Center from which parts of this book have been hewn. Various ideas and sentiments in Universal Man derive from the discussions of a reading-group that I attend: I thank Edward Behrens, Susie Boyt, Henrietta Bredin, Jonathan Keates, Alan Moses, Nicola Normanby, Miranda Seymour and Giles Waterfield for all their thoughtful nudges and zestful provocations, which I have recycled.
It is not just a dutiful rigmarole to add that Martin Redfern, my editor at HarperCollins, annotated the penultimate text of this book with candour, sympathy and shrewdness that I had no right to expect. Every reader should be grateful for his improving influence. A publisher at Penguin said some years ago that the book-production dream-team was Peter James as copy-editor with Christopher Phipps as indexer. I feel privileged to have had them both work with unflurried level efficiency on Universal Man. I would add Stephen Guise of HarperCollins as the third member of my dream-team: in superintending this book’s design and production he has been immaculate.
I thank the archivists of the Berenson Library, I Tatti, Florence; the British Library; Cambridge University Library; Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Hertfordshire Record Office; the House of Lords Record Office; King’s College, Cambridge; Magdalene College, Cambridge; the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London; and Sheffield University Library. The amenities of the London Library were helpful in the research of this book.
Unpublished writings of J. M. Keynes are © The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge 2015. Extracts from the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, edited by Donald Moggridge et al. (1971–89) are © The Royal Economic Society, published by Cambridge University Press. Extracts from letters written by Isaiah Berlin © the Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2015 are quoted by permission of the Trustees. For their consent to my use of copyright material I thank the Society of Authors, as agents of the Strachey Trust; Lord Williams of Oystermouth and the Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Arthur Benson’s diaries are held; and Faber & Faber and the estate of Louis MacNeice for extracts from ‘Autumn Journal’.
Susannah Burn, the daughter of Polly Hill and granddaughter of Margaret Keynes and A. V. Hill, has permitted the use of family photographs deposited in the archive at King’s, and together with her husband Alastair Burn has given the friendliest help with illustrations. Patricia McGuire, the archivist at King’s, has been painstaking in providing us with images. Geoffrey Keynes’s grandson Professor Simon Keynes, of Trinity College, Cambridge, has also been generous with his time and advice.
The patient support and smiling tolerance of Christopher Phipps and Jenny Davenport, despite my neglect of many simple decencies and responsibilities during work on the seven lives of Maynard Keynes, makes my all-surpassing debt to them.
So now, in the end, if this the least be good,
If any deed be done, if any fire