ABSTRACT
From his return to Cambridge after the First World War until his death in 1946, there was just one long spell when Keynes was a full-time Cambridge man: between 1919 and 1937 (when he was affected by the heart disease that was to seal his doom). Throughout this period, his life followed a regular pattern: ‘he was in Cambridge in term time from Thursday evening till Tuesday afternoon. Mid-week would be spent in London. Vacations were divided between London, foreign travel and Sussex’ (Skidelsky 1992: 4). However, after his marriage to Lydia Lopokova in 1925, his social life no longer revolved exclusively around the Bloomsbury circle, and in Cambridge he would still spend most of the time as a single don. In term time, every day of the week followed a set pattern for him. On Saturday mornings (and sometimes on Mondays too) there was the College Council, or the Governing Body, which often met for four or five hours. On Saturday afternoons, in the company of Piero Sraffa, an Italian who had come to Cambridge, he hunted down old books in second-hand bookshops and on the stalls in Market Place (Kahn 1984: 171). On Sunday mornings he would go over the Economic Journal business matters with Austin Robinson, who gives us a vivid picture of his collaboration, from 1934, as review editor ‘seated among the Sunday papers and the proofs of the Journal at the foot of Keynes’s bed in his room at King’s’ (Robinson 1990: 166). And then there was lunch or tea at his parents’ house in Harvey Road. And of course there was lecturing, supervising, attending University business, the work for the Royal Economic Society, managing College economic and academic affairs6 and, every other Monday in term time, attending the Political Economy Club. This seminar (‘Keynes’s Club’) was the focal point of economic debates in Cambridge. According to Lorie Tarshis, who was a student there in 1935: ‘Kahn [was] invariably present with a sprinkling of other faculty members . . . Sometimes academics from outside Cambridge attended too . . . there was a contingent of students, a very few research students amongst them and perhaps ten or twelve undergraduates.’ A paper was read by Keynes or a distinguished visitor, and students whose slips had been drawn were expected to stand up and comment on it; see also Plumptre 1947: 393; Moggridge 1992: 189; Skidelsky 1992: 5.
