Some of John Maynard Keynes's best writing can be found in these essays. He appears here partly as famous economist, but mainly as character analyst, memorialist, genealogist, bibliophile, and intellectual historian, as well as eye-witness to international diplomacy conducted at the highest level. This edition also contains two memoirs of an autobiographical kind that have been crucial to Keynes's biographers – though how he chose to depict the lives and intellectual habits of others is equally important for what it tells us about his own preferences. It also tells us a great deal about Keynes's relationship with the institutions and intellectual traditions that form his own background as well as that of his chosen cast.

The first edition of Essays in Biography published in 1933 was conceived of as a companion volume to the collection of previously published writings on public policy questions that Keynes had assembled as Essays in Persuasion in 1931. The two compilations drew on some of the same sources, notably the first of Keynes's works to command a worldwide audience, his Economic Consequences of the Peace. There are other links of a less obvious kind between the two collections. They belong to the same conjuncture in Keynes's life and that of the nation on the affairs of which he had acted, for the previous dozen years or so, as ‘a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time’ (IX, xvii).