"Speaking about great conversationalists among economists reminds me that you may wonder why I have not yet said more about Schumpeter—certainly the most brilliant talker among economists I have known with the sole exception of Keynes, with whom he had many other things in common, not least a puckish itch pour épater le bourgeois and a certain pretence to omniscience and a tendency to bluff which went far beyond their astounding knowledge. So far as Schumpeter is concerned, the fact is that during the few post-war years he lived at Vienna he had scarcely any contact with the economists and saw little even of those who had been his contemporaries in the Böhm-Bawerk seminar. Of course his two pre-war books and his essay on money were familiar to all of us. But we hardly saw him and some of his pronouncements on current affairs had earned him a reputation as an enfant terrible among economists."