Vanessa Bell did not set out to be radical. She set out to live honestly. The radicalism followed.

She believed that the way one lived mattered as much as the work one made, and that conventions—marriage, propriety, feminine self-effacement—were only useful if they did not interfere with the truth of daily life. When they did, she quietly stepped around them.

This was not a theory. It was practice.

John Maynard Keynes is usually introduced as the economist who saved capitalism from itself. That is true, as far as it goes. But it is not how he thought of himself, and it is not how he lived.

Keynes moved through the world less like a technocrat than like a man attentive to atmospheres—rooms, moods, confidences, collapses. His economics emerged not from abstraction, but from observation: how people actually behave when frightened, hopeful, reckless, bored. He did not believe that markets were rational systems tending naturally toward equilibrium. He believed they were made of people, and that people were volatile, suggestible, contradictory, and emotional.