Insupportable

John Bayley

  • A Choice of Kipling’s Prose by Craig Raine
    Faber, 448 pp, £12.50, January 1987, ISBN 0 571 13735 0
  • Kipling’s Kingdom: His Best Indian Stories by Charles Allen
    Joseph, 288 pp, £14.95, January 1987, ISBN 0 7181 2570 3

Charlie Chaplin was not hopeful when the talkies arrived in Hollywood. ‘It would mean giving up my tramp character entirely. Some people suggested that the tramp might talk. This was unthinkable.’ In his introduction, probably the most searching piece of Kipling criticism to date, Craig Raine quotes Chaplin’s words, and his further comment that the ‘matrix’ out of which the tramp was born was ‘as mute as the rags he wore’.

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The following books by Kipling were reissued by Penguin on 2 January:

Just So Stories for Little Children, edited and introduced by Peter Levi, 170 pp., £1.95, 0 14 043302 2
Debits and Credits, edited and introduced by Sandra Kemp, 314 pp., £2.95, 0 14 043285 X
Life’s Handicap, edited and introduced by P.N. Furbank, 320 pp., £2.95, 0 14 043279 5
Plain Tales from the Hills, edited by H.R. Woudhuysen, introduced by David Trotter, 295 pp., £2.50, 0 14 043287 6
The Jungle Books, edited and introduced by Daniel Karlin, 384 pp., £2.50, 0 14 043282 5
A Diversity of Creatures, edited and introduced by Paul Driver, 366 pp., £2.95, 0 14 043295 7
Puck of Pook’s Hill, edited and introduced by Sarah Wintle, 231 pp., £2.50, 0 14 043284 1
Something of Myself, edited by Robert Hampson, introduced by Richard Holmes, 220 pp., £3.95, 0 14 043308 2
Traffics and Discoveries, edited and introduced by Hermione Lee, 344 pp., £2.95, 0 14 043286 8

The following books were reissued by Oxford on 2 January in the ‘World’s Classics’ series:

Plain Tales from the Hills, edited and introduced by Andrew Rutherford, 279 pp., £2.50, 0 19 281652 7
The Man who would be King, and Other Stories, edited and introduced by Louis Cornell, 300 pp., £2.95, 0 19 281674 8
Life’s Handicap, edited and introduced by A.O.J. Cockshut, 324 pp., £2.95, 0 19 281671 3
The Day’s Work, edited and introduced by Thomas Pinney, 294 pp., £2.95, 0 19 281714 0
The Jungle Book, edited and introduced by W.W. Robson, 155 pp., £1.95, 0 19 281650 0
The second Jungle Book, edited and introduced by W.W. Robson, 215 pp., £1.95, 0 19 281655 1
Stalky and Co, edited and introduced by Isabel Quigley, 325 pp., £2.95, 0 19 281660 8
Kim, edited and introduced by Alan Sandison, 306 pp., £2.95, 0 19 281651 9