Opening paragraphs...................

 John Maynard Keynes was not an athletic man.  Though a spirited debater, he had always suffered from fragile health.  Overworked by choice and underexercised out of habit, he had acclimated himself to living in the constant shadow of head colds and influenza attacks.  He was thirty-one years old on the first Sunday of August 1914 and had lived nearly all those years at Cambridge, where, like his father before him, he held a minor academic post.  His friend and mentor Bertrand Russell was accustomed to seeing the younger man reviewing figures or buried in papers on weekend afternoons.  A King's College man, Keynes might, in moments of extreme restlessness, calm himself with a walk through the Great Court of Russell's Trinity College, taking in the turrreted medieval towers of King's Gate, the soaring gothic windows of the chapel built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the steady waters of the fountain designed when William Shakespeare had composed Hamlet.  Keynes was a man who savored tradition and contemplation.  He was perfectly suited for a life at the timeworn university.

-Zachary D. Carter, The Price Of Peace:  Money, Democracy, And The Life Of John Maynard Keynes