John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946

John Maynard Keynes, the eldest child of John Neville and Florence Ada Keynes, was born into a professional middle-class English household in Cambridge on 5 June 1883. There were three children, all gifted and destined to make their own mark, but Maynard Keynes excelled. He was his parents' favourite and modern students of sibling rivalry no doubt could have a field day analysing the consequent impact on his brother, Geoffrey and sister, Margaret. John Neville Keynes was a university lecturer in the Moral Science Tripos when Keynes was born (in the year that Karl Marx died). He was to be the author of two ‘minor classics’, Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (1884) and The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). He was also a colleague of Alfred Marshall, whose pupil Maynard Keynes became. He subsequently became the Registrary of the University in 1910. Florence Ada Keynes was a remarkable person and citizen of Cambridge – ‘the busiest woman in Cambridge’ (Skidelsky 1983, 425). Among many other activities she was Mayor of Cambridge in 1932–3. Both Keynes' parents outlived him, his father dying in 1949 and his mother in 1958.

Maynard Keynes went to Eton, where he excelled intellectually and socially, and then to King's, Cambridge to read mathematics. He seems to have spent as much time on philosophy as on mathematics and he continued his hectic social and intellectual life.