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Leonard Woolf and Kingsley Martin: Creative Tension on the Left*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
In 1965 Kingsley Martin, who had recently retired as editor of the New Statesman, published an article in Encounter entitled “Arguing with Keynes.” Although the self-serving memoir acknowledged Martin's admiration for “the swiftest and most powerful intellect that I have ever met,” it did little to enhance Keynes's reputation, revealing him as an apologist for Chamberlain's appeasement policy. Despite mutual respect, Keynes, the most active and certainly the most vociferous member of the New Statesman board of directors, regularly censured Martin for self-righteousness, complaining on one occasion that he was “perpetually engaged in conducting an indignation meeting.” After a dinner in 1945 at which Keynes castigated him for losing his “intellectual integrity,” the outraged editor retorted that he was “never again going to subject [himself] to [Keynes's] insults,” adding, “I understand now why people hate Maynard so much.”
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1992
Footnotes
*
A version of this article was presented at the joint meeting of the North American and Pacific Coast Conferences on British Studies at Santa Clara University in March 1991. I am grateful to the Rt. Hon. John Freeman for permission to quote from the Kingsley Martin Papers, Mrs. Trekkie Parsons for permission to quote from the Leonard Woolf Papers, Mrs. Elizabeth Inglis of the University of Sussex Library for assistance, and Peter Stansky for comments on the original paper.
References
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