Keynes does not fit the stereotype of the intellectually narrow twentieth- century economist.
He was criticized, in fact, for devoting too little of his time to economic theory and spreading his interests too broadly.
Even as a student at Eton and Cambridge he displayed this proclivity to pursue a wide range of interests; hence he came to be known as a dilettante.
His education completed, he entered the British government’s India Office as a civil servant, where he remained for two years before returning to Cambridge.
He was never exclusively an academic.
His continuing interest in economic policy led him to take a number of government posts throughout his life.
He was active in business affairs both for himself and as bursar of King’s College, and his ability in business is manifested by the fact that his net worth rose from near bankruptcy in 1920 to more than $2 million by the time of his death in 1946.
Keynes was interested in theater, literature, and the ballet; he married a ballerina and associated with a group of London intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group, which included such notables as Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf.
His unique mixture of talents enabled him to be an accomplished mathematician as an undergraduate, to write a book on probability theory, and to be a powerful and effective prose stylist, which is evident in the sheer literary mastery of both his Economic Consequences of the Peace and his essays, collected into two books as Essays in Persuasion and Essays in Biography.