from 1990, until illness was to force his early retirement from those positions in 1999. Max, as he was known by everyone, was born on 12 February 1944 in Maidenhead, Berkshire. From his father, Tom, a physicist who worked in atomic energy, Max inherited the insatiable intellectual curiosity that was to blossom in and after his late teens. From his mother Jean, a professional musician, Max derived his lifelong love of music. Max grew up first in Ayrshire, then Cambridge, and, from 1947, when Tom joined the Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell, in Culham near Oxford.
After school in Somerset and at Oundle, where Max was renowned for high spirits, a love of animals, and a rather limited respect for regulations, Max's intellectual gifts shone through at Oxford Technical College. With excellent A levels, Max gained a place at the London School of Economics, where he read Monetary Economics as his first degree. He then obtained his Master's in Economic Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles. After UCLA Max came back to the LSE in 1966 to do his doctorate (in finance and development), which he obtained four years later}a very modest interval by the standards of that time. Finance and Development were the fields in which all his subsequent work was done.
In the LSE during the later 1960s, Monetary and Financial Economics was a very exciting subject. Harry Johnson was then splitting his time between the LSE and the University of Chicago, editing the Journal of Political Economy and writing a huge series of papers on money, trade and economic development. Johnson exposed his LSE graduate students to all the debates and somewhat disconcerting arguments of the new group of US monetary economists, particularly Milton Friedman. Friedman was challenging the Keynesian orthodoxy to which Britain was then wedded.
What Max got from Harry Johnson, and his other LSE instructors, was an eager receptiveness to new techniques and ideas, the determination to write and communicate, and an insatiable curiosity about what the evidence told him about key economic relationships. These qualities never left him. Max always worked on a vast canvas, studying the details of as many developing and advanced economies as he could. He was a prolific author, a gifted and enthusiastic teacher, and a single-minded researcher with a burning wish to establish the central facts about economies' monetary and financial evolution.
For Max, it was economic policy that mattered most.