The key to selecting the winner, Keynes argued, wasn't choosing the face you think is the most beautiful, but rather anticipating the face that others will pick.
It's the difference between a great magic trick and brazenly telling the audience to its face you think they're dullards.
"News that Grampian existed, never mind that it was the largest banking conduit in Europe and now needed financial assistance from its parent, came as a total shock, akin to discovering a face you thought you were familiar with had suddenly grown an enormous protrusion," the Scotsman wrote at the time.
To which Lincoln responded, If I had two faces, do you think I'd be wearing this face?
The best strategy, Keynes said, is to select those faces that you think others will think prettiest.
In the Dostoyevsky Museum, housed in the apartment where the writer died, the narrator notes casually the "museum employees, young men and women with educated faces, making you think instinctively that they must be of Jewish origin".
But as one of them says: "When you look death in the face, do you think of democracy, freedom and honour?" No, you think how much you want to live.
Accused in a debate with Stephen Douglas of being two-faced, he replied: "If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?
"What I first found was tiny, like a spot on your face and you think it is massive, but you look in the mirror and you realise it is tiny," he said.
