ny first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell. The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey, though they were for the most part love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it. Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".
Political opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.
Keynes's friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began dating and pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who would later marry Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."
In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively. They married in 1925, with Keynes's former lover Duncan Grant as best man. "What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes" was said at the time. Keynes later commented to Strachey that beauty and intelligence were rarely found in the same person, and that only in Duncan Grant had he found the combination. The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied". Lydia became pregnant in 1927 but miscarried. Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation and supposedly humble social origins – the last of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf. In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova. E. M. Forster would later write in contrition: "How we all used to underestimate her".
Support for the arts
Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.
Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution, at least for a while, to become a major British stage outside London.
Keynes's personal interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the war, as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the war, Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was its founding chairman in 1946. Unsurprisingly, from the start the two organisations that received the largest grants from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.
Like several other notable British authors of his time, Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote on