Word: clever
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When John Maynard Keynes was five, his great-grandmother wrote to him, "You will be expected to be very clever, having lived always in Cambridge." The advice came late. Precocious Maynard, with the assistance of his father, a Cambridge don, had already begun collecting stamps and would soon go on to collect butterflies, pen nibs and numbers. Any numbers. Cricket statistics, people's heights and weights, train schedules...
Still, it took a while for the very clever boy to tally his sums and become an economist: he did not read Adam Smith until he was 27, and it took him even longer to become a complete human being. In the first of a two-volume biography that promises to be definitive, Robert Skidelsky, a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick, England, illuminates sensitively and in great detail how the making of an economist finally coincided with the making...
During his dazzling years at Eton and Cambridge, nobody doubted that the very clever boy would build a very clever career. But at what? He was as interested in medieval Latin poetry and Peter Abelard as he was in math and the laws of probability. When he took the civil service exams that led to his first job in the India Office in 1906, his lowest score was in economics. Even after he returned to Cambridge as a don and took to editing the Economic Journal, he was most comfortable among the aesthetes of Bloomsbury. Philosopher Bertrand Russell once referred...
...laid the groundwork for America's New Deal and Britain's welfare state. With Keynes' white-hot essay against the prohibitive peace that followed the costly war, Skidelsky has found the perfect stopping point for Volume I. Here, at 36, in the fullness of his moral indignation, the very clever boy came to ripeness as a man as well as an economist. Presuming that in this century "only economics could provide the correct reasoning for the achievement of the chivalrous society," as Skidelsky puts it, Keynes staked the claim of the economist to be king...
...THOSE WHO think wisdom most often resides in the mouths of babes, beware: You're a Good Man Charlie Brown is a kiddie show that's cutesy not clever. Given that it is a staged distortion of situations best left to the newspaper pages--or, if necessary, TV specials--the talented company does a respectable job of entertaining the little ones...