Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

The Right Honourable The Lord Skidelsky FBA
Robert Skidelsky, October 2014.
Born	(1939-04-25) 25 April 1939 (age 77) Harbin, China
Alma mater	Jesus College, Oxford
Title	Baron Skidelsky
Website	www.skidelskyr.com

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 in the University of Warwick, England.

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. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. In Harbin a factory was built by L. S. Skidelsky in 1919 for obtaining albumin from blood.

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.

Skidelsky has a son, Edward Skidelsky.

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.

During a two-year research fellowship at the British Academy, Skidelsky began work on his biography of Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published English Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor of History in 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.