As the shadow of the great financial crisis descended on the world economy in 2009, Lord Robert Skidelsky lambasted the discipline he had spent much of his academic life studying.
“I have always regarded their assumptions about human behaviour as absurdly narrow,” he wrote of economists in his book The Return of the Master. “I have come to see economics as a fundamentally regressive discipline . . . disguised by increasingly sophisticated mathematics and statistics.”
No one could accuse Skidelsky, who wrote the definitive biography of John Maynard Keynes, of being narrowly dogmatic — or indeed of dwelling on mathematical models. In a career that spanned continents, academic disciplines and the full spectrum of Britain’s political parties, Skidelsky, who died last week at 86, was never shy of expressing his views or of changing them.
His first major work to stir controversy was a biography of Oswald Mosley — published in 1975 — that was criticised as being overly sympathetic to the fascist leader. It reportedly stalled his academic career, costing him tenure at Johns Hopkins and shutting him out of Oxford. He instead went to Warwick university — where he became professor of international studies in 1978, and stayed.
At Warwick, Skidelsky immersed himself in research, poring over Keynes’ diaries, reading as much about his love life as about his thinking on policy. The three-volume biography encapsulated not only Keynes’ extraordinary achievements but also the eclectic brilliance of the Bloomsbury Group of artists, writers and intellectuals in which he played a central part.
Skidelsky’s affinity with Keynes took him so far as to buy the economist’s former house and live in it. There he mixed with families from the same Bloomsbury set that Keynes was part of, hosting a stream of weekend visitors from politics, literature and academia. The Sussex haven was a very long way from the world Skidelsky was born into in 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria. He was part of a wealthy family of Russian merchants displaced by the revolution, a process he described in a 2005 article as “a microcosm of the first wave of globalisation”.
The family — Jewish on his father’s side and Christian on his mother’s — were in 1941 interned by the Japanese and then moved to Britain after a prisoner swap. The young Robert attended Brighton College and then Jesus College, Oxford. Felix Martin, who later collaborated with Skidelsky, describes him as “an intellectual historian who really believed in the power of ideas”.
That belief took Skidelsky through a dizzying array of political metamorphoses. He moved from the Labour Party to help found the Social Democratic Party in 1981. He served briefly as an opposition spokesperson for the Conservatives in the House of Lords, but was sacked by Tory leader William Hague due to his opposition to Nato’s bombing of Serbia.
Later, his views shifted leftward and he expressed support for the hard-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — but, as his son Edward Skidelsky notes, he was too independent-minded to be a party man and “felt no obligation to be consistently one thing or another”. The financial crash from 2007 to 2009 only strengthened his affinity with Keynes, leading him to voice strong criticism of austerity policies.
He strongly advocated for a negotiated peace to end the Russia-Ukraine war. In a Lords debate last year, Skidelsky argued that any durable peace must take into account the security concerns of both countries, criticising ministers who described Vladimir Putin’s invasion as “unprovoked” and “barbaric”. Such views unsettled even the peer’s admirers. Martin argues they were rooted in his personal history, notably the Russian background of his parents. “He had a personal desire to reconnect with Russia and was sympathetic to it — not in a rose-spectacled way.”
That affinity led Skidelsky to tussle for years relearning Russian, his first language, and to undertake a train trip across Siberia on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway in 2017 on a journey ending in Vladivostok. “The entire train was lumberjacks and quite rough-looking individuals,” recalls Will Flemming, one of Skidelsky’s companions. The team survived on instant noodles and games of bridge.
It was his devotion to the works of Keynes — and his ability to explain their ongoing relevance — that will remain Skidelsky’s great legacy. As Marcus Millar, a colleague at Warwick, puts it, his books were written with as much intimacy as intellectual force. “Like a script of a play in which the author himself seems to belong.”