A person with great cultivation, the economist John Maynard Keynes had excellent writing talent to narrate memories, sketch portraits, and describe historical events. The two texts he read to his friends in the Bloomsbury circle prove this vividly. He was one of the pillars of the group along with Virginia Woolf, who expressed her admiration for the literary virtues revealed in these cases.

The first text, "Dr. Melchior: a defeated enemy," narrates the background of the consultations that preceded the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Keynes participated as one of the British delegates. It is a rare and fascinating description of the art of diplomatic negotiation, which reads like a novel.

The second text, "My Early Beliefs," refers to Keynes' student years at Cambridge, around 1900, and the beginnings of the Bloomsbury circle. It is the apprenticeship years of a free spirit.

"These two autobiographical texts are the only written works of the late Lord Keynes for which he explicitly expressed the desire to be published posthumously.
"Both texts were written to be read in the group of older and closest friends, with whom they regularly met to dine and listen to the reading of a text by one of the group, which revived memories of the past. Hence, they are distinguished by their particularly personal style. Above all, however, they reveal more than any other written work of Keynes that his characteristic intellectual disposition was a delightful mixture of sympathy, clarity, and sarcastic intelligence."
David Garne