Universal Man

The biography Richard Davenport-Hines wrote of John Maynard Keynes is organized by theme, presenting the man behind the economics as a connoisseur, intellectual, administrator and statesman as well as an economist. Keynes twice helped rescue Britain from financial crisis across two world wars and showed Western industrial states how to guard against revolutionary unrest, economic instability, unemployment and social breakdown. He moved as easily among the Bloomsbury Group as among the presidents whose policies he shaped. By examining the desires and experiences that drove his thinking, Davenport-Hines finds an aesthetic basis for Keynesian economics, and he asks why Keynes's ideas still guide readers some seventy years after his death.

WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell had it on his summer reading in a Books CEOs Will Be Reading This Summer roundup.