“ Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one… Richard Davenport-Hines
“ He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning. Richard Davenport-Hines
“ Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of… Richard Davenport-Hines
“ The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist. Richard Davenport-Hines
“ Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating… Richard Davenport-Hines
“ Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: ‘A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dis… Richard Davenport-Hines
“ At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies. Richard Davenport-Hines
“ Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience. Richard Davenport-Hines
“ Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach t… Richard Davenport-Hines
“ Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "car… Richard Davenport-Hines
