Biography was an occupation which sustained Keynes throughout his life in parallel with his work as an economist, and it resulted in his ‘Essays in Biography’, first published in 1933 but expanded by later essays that make up the Royal Economic Society (RES) edition of this work. As Publications Secretary to the RES, Donald Winch has written a reappraisal of Keynes’s work in this field to accompany a reissue of the essays. The lecture is based on this and deals with the literary context of Keynes’s essays, showing their Bloomsbury roots and their origin in such fields as genealogy, eugenics, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Keynes’s need to understand the intellectual traditions that had conditioned economics as a policy-oriented discipline – the discipline to which Keynes was to make a major contribution in his ‘General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ in 1936.