y 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 how Virginia Woolf, Keynes and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality. Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind."
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £11 million ($16.5 million) in 2009. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various good causes and his personal ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market, in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.
Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum). He enjoyed collecting books; he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. In part on the basis of these papers, Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."
Keynes successfully managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge, with the active component of his portfolio outperforming a British equity index by an average of 8% a year over a quarter century, earning him favourable mention by later investors such as Warren Buffett and George Soros.
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from about 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasion