11 Quotes by Richard Davenport-Hines

The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.

Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating, is worth very little and has only callow, childish pleasures.

He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,' reported Virginia Woolf. 'He works only because he likes it.

Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things that should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.