Colin Welch
Kind people would be very sorry if they knew how little I read except in the course of duty. Well, apart from those I've already pontificated about in these pages, I was honoured to review for the American Spectator the US edition of Robert Skidelsky's stupendous first volume of John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed — 188.3-1920 (Viking). This is an artistic as well as revelatory masterpiece a virtual resurrection of a clever, fascinating, impor- tant and awful man. Delicately veiled by Harrod, Keynes appears for the first time as he really was. The result is not for family reading by the fireside. Skidelsky himself is not I think wholly sympathetic to the idea that there is a close link between Keynes's perverse sexuality and his economic and philosophical ideas. The weird facts are all there however. Make up your own mind. Last Christmas I got The Glasgow Boys by Roger Billcliffe (John Murray in associa- tion with Britoil) — a wonderful solace in dark times. some of the work of these talented turn-of-the-century Glasgow paint- ers here reproduced seems to me first class. Look at the jacket for a start, E. A. Walton's Gamekeeper's Daughter, at once pensive and glowing with health and see again Sir James Guthrie's marvel- lous little goose-girl To Pasture's New. Out of fashion for a time, but cherished for many years and now restored to proper respect.
Previous page
