And when in middle age, to the horror of the Apostles, he married the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, he went at hetero sex with the same vigour and curiosity (in that respect not unlike Jeremy Thorpe). Unlike Harrod, who was constrained by the law, and Skidelsky, constrained I think by delicacy, Davenport-Hines gives us the sex life, hot and strong, blow by blow. It is worth noting that Keynes also used the language of flirtation and seduction to describe his negotiations with bankers and politicians. Some critics have attempted to elide his sexual practice and his economic theory. Both were, after all, promiscuous, a series of one-night stands. Was Keynes not famous for saying that ‘in the long run we are all dead’? For all the density of his theoretical writings, was he ultimately anything more than the maestro of the quick fix? Certainly it is easy to point to the things he got wrong: his belief in the 1930s that there was not going to be another world war or another world slump, his forecast of ‘the euthanasia of the rentier’, his fervent belief that by the 21st century we would have overcome the problems of scarcity and would all be free to pursue the lives of civilised pleasure then available only to the fortunate few of Bloomsbury. He not only lacked any religious sense, his sunny nature blinded him to the tragic possibilities of life and made him slow to grasp the menace of the Nazis. On the other hand, his forceful advice to governments of all parties for so many years did, literally, do a power of good. At the end of the Second World War, already
desperately ill with then incurable heart disease, he drove himself to the grave by crossing and recrossing the Atlantic to nail down the American loans which saved millions in Europe from starvation. It was a hero’s end to a hero’s career. Keynes’s most dubious legacy is the enhanced prestige that economists have come to enjoy, despite their repeated failure to predict the next crisis, so acutely pointed out by HM The Queen. Keynes famously claimed that ‘practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. Recent experience would tend to suggest something like the reverse. These days you find economists spinning theories in support of the conventional wisdom of businessmen, for example, the Efficient Market Hypothesis which declares that the market always prices things correctly. This hypothesis took a purler in 2008–09, as did the notion of ‘the Great Moderation’, which convinced Ben Bernanke and Gordon Brown that there would be no more boom and bust. It could be argued that Keynes’s inexhaustible ingenuity helped to imbue governments with an unjustified confidence in their own ability to ‘steer the economy’ and to find overnight solutions to deep-seated problems. Perhaps it is not Keynesian economic theory that has done the damage but the Keynesian political style. This is an entrancing book, always light but never weightless, and I am sure that John Maynard Keynes would have enjoyed it.
Tetbury Station in 1955. It was demolished in 1964 to make way for a car park
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THE OLDIE – April 2015
Stopping all stations Christian Wolmar
The English Railway Station by Steven Parissien English Heritage £25 Oldie price £22.50 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order
Railway books tend to fall into two categories: those that provide too much extraneous detail (as in: ‘The first sod of the Dorset Central was cut at Blandford by Lady Smith of the Down House … the expenses of the ceremony amounted to £224 13s 2d including £71 for wine…’), and at the other extreme, those aimed at the presents-for-my-trainspotter-uncle type, which are often little more than train porn with a few poorly researched captions and a general history from Brunel to Beeching. A few, like this sympathetic and accessible account of a much-neglected part of railway history, get it just right, balancing the pictures with the detail and sufficient context. The station was something of an afterthought in railway development. The first passenger-carrying railway, the Stockton & Darlington, did not bother to provide stations at all when it opened, merely stopping at pre-set points to allow passengers to get on or off, not an easy task given the lack of a platform. But the Stockton & Darlington was, in any case, a rather crude affair, mostly horse drawn and used for freight; it was therefore hardly surprising that it was the world’s first double-tracked fully steam-hauled railway, the Liverpool & Manchester, opened in 1830, that realised its passengers needed a station where they could buy tickets and shelter from the elements. This was the railway’s Crown Street terminus in Liverpool, which set the tone for many of its successors as it was designed by an established architect who was asked to provide a building that was ‘both solidly familiar and warmly reassuring’. It took a bit of time for railway companies to understand that passengers, rather than freight, were going to be their most lucrative market. Thus while many of the early efforts were ‘an assortment of sheds, huts and barns, invariably scruffy, draughty and uncomfortable’, a tradition soon built up of well-appointed buildings that adapted a range of styles to the needs of a railway station. Soon, the companies produced comfortable facilities for their passengers and