John Maynard Keynes was the most famous economist of the twentieth century. But what role did the Bloomsbury Group play in shaping his life and work? As one of the key members of this famous set of Bohemian artists and intellectuals, did his close friendships with Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Virginia Woolf help or hinder when he reluctantly served the World War I Treasury, battled the establishment over the Versailles Peace Settlement, or struggled to form his famous theories of unemployment in the years of the Great Depression? And how did he affect them?

While he may have received inspiration from the friendship and artistic philosophy of Bloomsbury, it was also a source of enormous tension – never more so than when he fell in love with the Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. Keynes’ friends were almost united in their disapproval, and he was banished from the Bloomsbury retreat of Charleston. ‘How we all underestimated her,’ commented novelist E.M. Forster later. Yet out of this conflict emerged both an extraordinary relationship between Keynes and Lydia, and the start of a political and economic revolution with long lasting consequences.

This talk aims to give an insight into Keynes’ life and loves, the culture of Bloomsbury, and how Keynes’ ideas and the events and cultural climate of the 1920s and 1930s remain deeply relevant to our lives now.