Robert Skidelsky

Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky, was a British economic historian, author, and crossbench peer whose three-volume life of John Maynard Keynes is widely treated as the definitive modern biography of the twentieth century's most influential economist. Born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, then under Japanese control in Manchuria, he was the son of Boris Skidelsky and Galia (nee Sapelkin), British subjects of Russian ancestry (Jewish on his father's side, Christian on his mother's). The family firm L. S. Skidelsky operated the large Mulin coalmine. After war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, the family was interned, then released in a prisoner exchange and resettled in Britain. Skidelsky's earliest London memories included sheltering under a table during the Blitz. A brief postwar return to China ended when communist forces took Tianjin; the family left for Hong Kong and then Britain for good.

He boarded at Brighton College (1953-1958), read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and from 1961 to 1969 moved through research student, senior student, and research fellow posts at Nuffield College. His first book, Politicians and the Slump (1967), examined how British politicians handled the Great Depression and announced a lifelong fascination with the 1930s. English Progressive Schools (1969) followed. A 1975 biography of Oswald Mosley proved controversial; critics felt it was too sympathetic, and Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, where he taught as an associate professor from 1970, refused him tenure. Oxford also declined a permanent post. After two years as professor at the Polytechnic of North London (1976-1978), Warwick University appointed him Professor of International Studies in 1978. In 1990 he joined Warwick's Economics Department as Professor of Political Economy, retiring emeritus in 2006 after nearly three decades, while remaining a visible presence (including a 2023 sanctions panel).

The Keynes project defined his public stature. Volume 1, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 (1983), opened the trilogy. Volume 2, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992), won the Wolfson History Prize. Volume 3, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000; U.S. title often Fighting for Freedom), won the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, the Arthur Ross Book Award, and the Lionel Gelber Prize, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He later abridged the trilogy into a one-volume John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946 (2003). To absorb the atmosphere of Keynes's world, he configured study space at Keynes's Sussex house, Tilton, and wrote at Keynes's desk. The Guardian later underlined how thoroughly he inhabited that world.

After the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse, Skidelsky argued that free-market orthodoxy had left policymakers unprepared. Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009) returned Keynes to popular debate. He praised early stimulus, then spent years attacking what he saw as premature austerity under George Osborne, describing himself as part of an "embattled minority." With his philosopher son Edward he co-wrote How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life (2012), a critique of endless growth and a plea for the ethical good life. Later books included Money and Government (2018), What's Wrong with Economics? (2020), The Machine Age (2023), Mindless (2024), and the posthumously published Keynes for Our Times (Yale, June 2026).

Politically he was a self-described maverick. He left Labour for the Social Democratic Party, received a life peerage in 1991 as Baron Skidelsky of Tilton, took the Conservative whip (1992-2001), served briefly as an opposition spokesman, and was removed by William Hague after opposing NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. From 2001 he sat as a crossbencher. He chaired the Social Market Foundation (1991-2001), chaired Brighton College governors (2004-2017), wrote for Project Syndicate for two decades, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (1994), with additional fellowships (FRHistS, FRSL). In later Lords speeches he urged negotiated settlement over open-ended war in Ukraine, a stance that drew sharp criticism and praise in equal measure. He married Augusta Hope in 1970; they had Edward, William, and Juliet. He died on 15 April 2026, aged 86, ten days before his 87th birthday, and is survived by Augusta, their three children, and six grandchildren.