Keynes appears in all three novels, The Addlestone Chronicles.
During the 1930s and 1940s, he was Bursar of King’s College, Cambridge and advised His Majesty’s Governments. He is universally acknowledged as the most influential economist of the 20 th century. In 1936, he published his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which focussed on the causes and remedies of disruptive business cycles. An opponent of the existing view that the role of government should be neutral, like a referee, he proposed an active role whereby deficit spending could end slowdowns, recessions, and even mitigate the damage caused by the Great Depression that ran from 1929 to 1939. In 1919, he advised the British Government where the Versailles Treaty was drafted to enable reparations to be placed on the defeated German government. Keynes was prescient. He predicted if the Treaty stood as written, it would lead to another war with Germany within 20 years. For this ‘disloyalty’ to the British establishment, Keynes was forced to return to England where he wrote the influential and readable, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He regularly advised FDR in the 1930s and in 1944, as WWII was coming to a close and victory was in sight, he was the prime mover at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire. There, the World Bank, the IMF, and fixed but flexible exchange rates were established to enable post-war reconstruction. Bertrand Russell said of Keynes, “He is the sharpest and clearest mind I ever knew. When I argued with him, I felt like my life was hanging by a thread and I rarely ended up feeling anything other than stupid.”