The Unforgiving Minute: The Life of Rudyard Kipling - Hardcover

Ricketts, Harry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701137444 ISBN 13: 9780701137441

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

Harry Ricketts brings Kipling to life - his traumatic childhood, split between England and India; his youthful years as a reporter in India, troubled by love and politics; and his first fame and return to London. Ricketts explores Kipling's passions, his imperialism, and his thirst to find a home.

About this title

Review

It came as a shock when Rudyard Kipling's "If" was recently voted the UK's favourite poem. This, after all, was a shopping list of what makes "a man", and, from what we vaguely knew of Kipling--a bit of colonialist Jungle Book washed down with the public school japes of Stalky and Co --his ideal "man" was likely to be a throwback to unenlightened Empire days: Great Britishness at its most embarrassing. So now seems an ideal time to review the man behind the verse.

With an eye for the telling domestic anecdote, Ricketts refuses to let Kipling have the last word on his own life, constantly pointing up the inconsistencies in Kipling's political positions and actions and locating the impetus for Kipling's obsession with hatred and orphanhood in his troubled chilldhood. Drawing heavily on letters and newspapers as well as Kipling's own personal and professional writings, Ricketts conjures up Rud's multiple worlds--from the Burne-Jones's cultural gatherings to a vivid fin-de-siecle Lahore to his latter, painful days in Sussex. With an admirable ability to move from Indian politics to family gossip within a paragraph, Ricketts gives us a Kipling whose complex life now demands a reconsideration of his work. --Alan Stewart

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701137444
• ISBN 13: 9780701137441
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448