“... will have cottoned on to this subterfuge by now.30 May. A poem for Boris. ‘A Dead Statesman’, Rudyard Kipling (from ‘Epitaphs of the War 1914-18’):I could not dig: I dared not rob:Therefore I lied to please the mob.Now all my lies are proved untrueAnd I must face the men I slew.What tale shall serve me here amongMine angry and defrauded young?3 ...”

“... that early imprint of adventure and empire yarns by G.A. Henty and C.S. Forester, John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, literature in which the world is ‘British’.I don’t remember what I read, just a mood, a pace. But I know writers don’t conceal their attitudes. And their glorying in the derring-do and brigandry are part and parcel ...”

“... places have something in common with the art of another and earlier Nobel Prize-winner, Rudyard Kipling. But the timely comparison and contrast is with a more recent winner, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Both authors have written in a wide range of forms and both are exiles – Milosz in America – though in Canetti’s case exile is itself ...”

“... Certain families,’ Kipling wrote in his story ‘The Tomb of His Ancestors’, ‘serve India generation after generation as dolphins follow in line across the open sea.’ It was common indeed for three generations of the same family to spend their careers in India; often it was four, sometimes five, occasionally six ...”

“... the heading ‘Institutional America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence (‘Primitive America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley (Psychedelic America’), and Christopher Isherwood (‘Mystical ...”

“... to hear Frenchmen airing ideas about colonial development etc which are audacious in the manner of Rudyard Kipling.’ But Hanoi was at least pretty, with streets radiating from a lake surrounded with trees at the centre, cafés with pink and white awnings and flower baskets at every corner. He found Hong Kong ‘grotesquely ugly – the part which is ...”

“... of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James Campbell McInnes, a man of working-class ...”

“... why the British were not in Vietnam, why the Australians were; the Barrack Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling (the colonel was reading them); and then, with the sudden tropical night and the first mosquitoes, the talk got around, as it usually did, to what the war might be about. ‘Do people out in The World understand what we are doing ...”

“... understand this any longer. The White Man’s Burden, that heroic civilising mission depicted by Rudyard Kipling in his proud poem of 1899 as the destiny of the white race, has turned against us and become a true burden, a depressing sense of guilt about colonisation, slavery and economic exploitation of the developing world. Which now prevents us from ...”