‘We would rather eat our cake than merely have it’ 
Rosemary Hill
- A Circle of Sisters: Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin by Judith Flanders
- The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling 1862-1939 by Adam Nicolson
- Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women edited by Heather Creaton
Frank Doubleday, the American publisher and friend of Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked. To which the answer came: ‘I was looking over old papers and I got thinking. No one’s going to make a monkey out of me after I die.’ But Kipling has been more caricatured in popular memory than most.
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Rosemary Hill’s book about Pugin, God’s Architect, is out in paperback this summer.
Other articles by this contributor:
Keep Calm · Desperate Housewives
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