Hello and welcome to this special episode of Bad Gaze, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.

My name is Hugh Lemmy. I'm an author, and today I'm joined by Richard Power Saeed, who is a former Labour Party official and is also the author of 1997, The Future That Never Happened, a cultural and political history of the year 1997 and its influence since, which should

be of special interest to our listeners on account of its extended analyses of both Princess

Die and the Spice Girls.

We're recording this over the internet due to coronavirus restrictions, so I apologize

in advance for any issues we may experience from that.

But I think today's subject is probably one of the most influential people we've ever

featured on the show, short of maybe Alexander the Great, and certainly one of the most

influential people in the 20th century.

Yet as a public figure, he might be amongst our least well known.

He's perhaps better known through his ism, an economic theory that came to dominate Western

government politics in the decades that followed the Second World War.

And indeed, despite the rise of neoliberalism as a response to his ideas, his ideas still

underpinned the international response to both the Great Recession that started in 2008

and also to coronavirus.

He's the British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Ricky, what can you tell us about Keynes?

So there's so much to tell and obviously I'm going to give you a really truncated version

of the story and yes, it's going to be quite long, but hopefully not.

It's got plenty of sex, that's the important thing, right?

We're going to start in 1883.

John Maynard Keynes was born into an upper-middle-class family in Cambridge.

...