Search Results

“... His cousin Oliver Baldwin described Kipling’s story ‘Mary Postgate’ as ‘the wickedest story in the world’. It did shock its readers very much, but it is not entirely easy to determine just what the shocking element was, perhaps still is. Told with a subdued but cheerful elegance a little in the manner of Jane Austen’s novels, which Kipling much admired, it is a tale about a virtuous spinster companion during the Great War, whose employer’s nephew in the RFC is killed on a training flight ...”

“... plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling. In addition to being one of the most lopsided lives ever written – 23 chapters on the first forty years, only two chapters on the last thirty – this is also one of the most incorrigible in its guesswork. Indeed, Seymour-Smith’s claim to have been ...”

“... living in the world,’ he writes, ‘with whom I am in supreme sympathy, Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling.’ All this might seem pretty damning and stupid, but there’s another element in Haggard’s response to the war which complicates things. That is his capacity to be worn down by the grinding tragedy of it all. His nephews were killed. His ...”

“... to confer just government on those peoples, swarthier perhaps, who stood in need of it; the man Rudyard Kipling was to consult on whether the much-criticised ‘Recessional’ had struck the right note; the man above all haunted by the thought of the Queen’s vast empty realms and the reluctance of his fellow men, proud as they were of their ...”

“... from their Gracious Majesties the King and Queen’. The message’s wording was chosen by Rudyard Kipling and the secretary of state for war, Lord Derby. Kipling wanted to use a form letter with blank spaces, allowing for what he termed ‘M. S. interpolation’, but the proposal was vetoed by Derby on ...”

“... their purveyors’ states of mind rather than any political realities. In 1917, for instance, Rudyard Kipling was told by ‘a man in the train’ that Churchill had been brought into the Government because he was ‘able to blackmail the Prime Minister’. Kipling duly retailed this. It would have taken more than ...”

“... him out, the brute!’, But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot. Rudyard Kipling wrote ‘Tommy’ in order to call attention to a couple of questions that were not new then and are with us still: what sort of an army do we need, and how do we regard and use the one we’ve got? To these questions, there are two ...”

“... whether conflict with her could be avoided: meanwhile, the British Empire seemed at its zenith and Kipling and Newbolt were the most flourishing poets of the day. After ‘much falling’, Lionel Johnson had made his legendary descent to death from a bar stool, and Yeats’s other companions were no longer to be found in the Cheshire Cheese. The ...”

“... and male foreman’. One girl was pursued by another into the hall, where the master of the house, Rudyard Kipling, ‘found her looking like Britannia on her pitchfork and howling “Ther dirty woman!” ’ This book has no axe to grind. It draws discriminately on published memoirs and aristocratic archives to build up a sympathetic, often poignant ...”

“... Early in his career, then, Doyle is already well on that road to En-Dor which his contemporary, Rudyard Kipling, refused to take. But, equally early, he is aware of a perplexing incongruity between the trifling and frequently grotesque deliverances of mediumship and the tremendous issue of the possible survival of human personality after bodily ...”

“... foreign culture as the advance of civilisation and the rule of law. In the Aeneid, Virgil – the Rudyard Kipling of the Roman world – aimed to encapsulate an imperial mission statement for the Roman Empire. In the Underworld, the poem’s hero, Aeneas, receives a prophecy of Rome’s greatness from his father’s ghost: ‘Roman … your arts are to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling tells how he returned to Bombay from public school in England. He had been away for 11 years, but once again walking the streets of Bombay, the town of his birth, the teenage Kipling found himself uttering whole sentences in the native tongue – presumably Marathi, a language he had entirely forgotten ...”

“... who wrote poetry, novels and children’s stories, was a sister-in-law of Burne-Jones and aunt of Rudyard Kipling. From Burne-Jones and William Morris, a family friend, her husband commissioned work; from Kipling her son derived a touch of literary inspiration and even an occasional helping hand with his ...”

“... with the 1960s: more the mode that, forty years previously, Stanley Baldwin (or his cousin Rudyard Kipling) had sometimes tried out. Powell continues: ‘They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection,’ and so on. This reads like John ...”