Here's a dude worth at least some of your attention. A British intellectual, contrarian, educator, political activist, and historian, whose major life's work and feature is the bibliography series of John Maynard Keynes — uncovering and repackaging that man's ideas for the 21st century.

A beautiful example of how single-minded life-long focus on becoming the best at one thing can yield extreme outcomes and compound over decades.

Skidelsky has forgotten more about Keynes than I have ever knownSkidelsky has forgotten more about Keynes than I have ever known

He attended my alma mater before, uhm, my mother was born. He's been around a while.

Robert boarded at Brighton College and decades later would chair its board of governors during a period when it became one of the country’s top-performing schools. He read history at Jesus College, Oxford, studied for a doctorate and became a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford where he developed a lifelong passion for educational reform.

Say what you will about Keynes and about Skidelsky's very modern-Keynes ideas about government and how to run the economy, he's a well-respected scholar and an amazing writer.

I've certainly not read the 3-volume Keynes biography in its entirity (it's freakin 1,500 pages combined... I may like pain #1416952, #1474724 — but not that much...). The titles, I presume, tell much of the story?

• John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920 (Vol. 1)
• John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 (Vol. 2)
• John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946 (Vol. 3)

Unsurprisingly perhaps, his multi-award-winning account of the founding father of macroeconomics was sympathetic to the man and his interventionist economic philosophy, but, reviewers averred, no less authoritative for that.

I crossed paths with him in the mid-2010s, when he was dead focused on reforming the economics education in the UK (Core curriculum, something). Gave lots of lectures, spoke to students, tried to reform universities. Very little came of it, iirc, but I see now that he wrote some books on the subject. I better go check out Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics... I won't like it, but it seems fitting. (Also two recent books on AI, and one on economic sanctions(!), that had completely passed me by. The things you miss when you're deep down Bitcoinland.)

Screwed by capitalism and communism bothScrewed by capitalism and communism both

From the Times obituary:

Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky was born in the city of Harbin, in the Japanese-occupied Chinese province of Manchuria in 1939. He was born into a Russian family that was Jewish on his father’s side and Christian on his mother’s; his parents had fled Russia after the revolution in 1917 and had become British subjects. “It was family lore that my father had bought £6 million in cash from Russia. But we lost it all in the 1929 stock market crash. We are victims of communism and capitalism alike,” Skidelsky told The Times in 1989.

“To be a good economist you have to have an understanding of history, psychology, sociology and politics,” he said.“To be a good economist you have to have an understanding of history, psychology, sociology and politics,” he said.

Hayek said something similar, no?

To maximally annoy some of the peeps in here (DOWNZAP ME?!):

In later years Skidelsky relearnt the Russian he had long forgotten since childhood. From 2008, Skidelsky was a non-executive director of Sistema, the Russian telecommunications company, and a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies as well as founder and executive secretary of the UK/Russia Round Table. He once concluded a lecture in Russian with the words “I have finished”, not realising that in modern parlance it meant having achieved sexual climax.

He opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and was no apologist for Putin, but was also critical of Nato’s “provocative” actions in the region and expressed sympathy for the view that Russia felt threatened on its borders.
Like Keynes, who was married to a Russian ballerina and mixed with the Bloomsbury set of artists, writers and intellectuals, Skidelsky was a cultured man who loved classical music and opera. Above all else he loved good conversation, and ensured he got plenty of it with a wide circle of friends

Very beautiful cover in this forthcoming book (June, 2026). Bookmarked.

archive:

https://archive.md/ZT73I