Abstract

This fascinating biography of an economist who was also a logician and administrator, is based mainly upon his virtually continuous diary. The diary provides an intimate commentary on the academic developments and conflicts in which he was closely involved as well as on his life as undergraduate, bachelor and family man. It is the insight into J. Neville Keynes's personality, as well as his moral integrity as a diarist, which gives this book a particularly illuminating perspective from which to view the social and educational revolution that transformed Cambridge University during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Life and Times of J. Neville Keynes faithfully records the shifts in, and debates on, the educational, constitutional and financial context within which the academic revolution gradually and often stormily developed and in which J. Neville Keynes played such a vital and integral part.