The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling - Softcover

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 childhood. 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

A vivid study of Kipling's life in relation to his work, cutting through the myths that surround him.