Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky,
FBA (born 25 April 1939), is a British
economic historian of Russian origin and the author of a major, award-winning, three-volume biography of British economist
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). He read history at
Jesus College, Oxford and is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the
University of Warwick, England.
[1][2]
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Skidelsky's parents, Boris Skidelsky and Galia Sapelkin, were British subjects of Russian ancestry, Jewish on his father's side and Christian on his mother's.
[3] His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in
Manchuria then Japan, and finally released in exchange for Japanese internees in England. Then he went back to China with his parents in 1947, living for a little over a year in
Tientsin (now Tianjin). They left for Hong Kong just before the Communists took the city.
[4]
[edit] Education
From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at
Brighton College. He went on to read history at
Jesus College, Oxford. From 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at
Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book,
Politicians and the Slump, based on his
D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the
Great Depression.
[5]
[edit] Academic career
During a two-year research fellowship at the
British Academy, Skidelsky began work in his biography of
Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published
English Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor of History at the
School of Advanced International Studies,
Johns Hopkins University. But the controversy surrounding the publication of his biography of Sir
Oswald Mosley – in which he was felt to have let Mosley off too lightly – led
Johns Hopkins University to refuse him tenure. Oxford University also proved unwilling to give him a permanent post. From 1976 to 1978, he was professor of history, philosophy and European studies at the
Polytechnic of North London. In 1978, he was appointed Professor of International Studies at the
University of Warwick, where he has since remained, though joining the Economics Department as Professor of Political Economy in 1990. He was appointed Professorial Fellow of the Global Policy Institute at
London Metropolitan University. Skidelsky has been an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, since 1997. He was elected a Fellow of the
British Academy in 1994.
[5] He is currently writing a book on globalisation with Vijay Joshi, a Fellow of
St John's College, Oxford.
[citation needed]
[edit] Political career
Skidelsky has been a member of three political parties: originally a
Labour Party member, he left that party to become a founding member of the
Social Democratic Party, where he remained until the party's dissolution in 1992. In 1991, he was made a
life peer, and in 1992 he became a
Conservative.
[5] He was made chief opposition spokesman in the Lords, first for Culture, then for Treasury affairs (1997–9), but he was removed by the then Conservative party leader
William Hague, for publicly opposing
NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia.
[5] In 2001, he left the Conservative Party for the
Cross Benches. He was chairman of the
Social Market Foundation between 1991 and 2001.
[5]
[edit] Awards
Skidelsky's second volume of his three-volume biography of
John Maynard Keynes,
The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937, won the
Wolfson History Prize in 1992.
[5] The third volume,
Fighting for Britain, 1937–1946, won the
Duff Cooper Prize in 2000, the
Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction writing in 2000, the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 2001, the
Arthur Ross Book Award for international relations in 2002, and the
Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations.
[5]
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