Sir Geoffrey Keynes's achievements in any one of several different fields--bibliography, book collecting, history of medicine, editing, or surgery-- would have established his reputation. Few people in the twentieth century can have left their mark on such a wide range of human activity.

Geoffrey Langdon Keynes was born in Cambridge on 25 March 1887, the youngest of three children. The Keynes family (the name rhymes with "rains") had come to England in the Norman invasion of 1066 and established itself as landed gentry. Geoffrey's branch of the family was solidly middle class. His paternal grandfather was a professional horticulturist; his father, John Neville Keynes, had been a fellow at Pembroke College and at University College, London, where he lectured on moral science (a collection of disciplines that included philosophy, political science, economics, psychology, and ethics). He married Florence Ada Brown in 1882, and because of the requirement of celibacy he had to...