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Donald Moggridge (ed.), Keynes on the Wireless (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
John Maynard Keynes rarely hesitated to communicate his ideas to the public. His books, articles, letters, memoranda, speeches, political tracts, and addresses to shareholders - reproduced in the 30 volumes of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes - testify to his literary fecundity. Yet he did not confine himself simply to the printed word; he quickly recognised the power of the electronic media, which in his day meant 'the wireless' (or radio). From January 1925 to July 1945 he made 21 broadcasts, all but one of them for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Keynes on the Wireless contains all of Keynes's broadcasts. The date when each of the broadcasts was made is indicated, and footnotes provide the date and place of the first British publication of the broadcast and its location in The Collected Writings. The editor, Donald Moggridge, provides both a general introduction to the collection and shorter introductions to most of the individual broadcasts.
Moggridge states that Keynes experienced some difficulties with the broadcasts. The first broadcast, entitled 'Inter-allied Debts', went to air on 9 January 1925 during politically delicate Anglo-French negotiations over French war debts to Britain. Keynes was warned that his views would not be welcomed in high places, and his text was censored at the last moment by the Foreign Office on the grounds that it was pro-French. A later talk - 'The Pros and Cons of Tariffs' - also ran into difficulties with the BBC; Keynes was asked to remove certain references considered to be politically sensitive. There were problems, too, about the relation between the spoken and written word: Keynes expected to publish his talks but did not want to spend precious time rewriting them. The BBC, however, expected the talks to sound right and was not interested in their written form.
Since all the broadcasts are included in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, there is reason to ask why they have been reproduced again. Moggridge provides no justification for their re-publication. A CD of Keynes's spoken words would have been more apposite, and welcome, but the editor does not raise this possibility. I suspect any original sound recordings have been destroyed, but we are...