ABSTRACT
In September 1938 Maynard Keynes presented My Early Beliefs to the Memoir Club, the name given to those regular encounters at which Old Bloomsbury shared recollections and attempted to clarify the record for posterity.1 Keynes recalled that he and his fellow Cambridge Apostles, adopting G.E.Moore’s “religion” while discarding his morals, recognized neither moral obligation, nor “inner sanction to conform or to obey.” Describing his circle as “water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath,” he helped to foster an image of Bloomsbury as self-absorbed and frivolous, preoccupied with the enjoyment of romantic and aesthetic experience.2
