"He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors" (Many Inventions)

Few authors have had their work stifled by the current vogue for political correctness more than Rudyard Kipling. Whole books of his wonderful writing have fallen prey of taboo and a widespread disgust at the excesses of colonial times. Born into an upper-middle class family in Bombay in 1865, Kipling was living at the height of the British Empire. The Indian Mutiny had been put down ten years earlier, and Kipling would go on to celebrate what many see now as the shameful subjugation of poorer nations: he was the champion of British Imperialism. Perhaps the explanation behind this utter devotion to the Empire was Kipling's unhappy experiences in Britain. He was sent to live in Sussex at the age of six and endured many miserable years of schooling in various boarding schools - documented in the notoriously rose-tinted Stalky and Co.

Kipling returned to India at the first opportunity to work as a journalist. He began to write fiction at the same time, and continued to observe and record the huge variety of native life he came across on his travels. In 1892, he published a collection of poetry: Barrack-Room Ballads, which contains many of his most well-known poems. It captured the zeitgeist perfectly, extolling the Empire and conjouring up nationalistic feeling (by this time Britain was beginning to lose its position as the most powerful country in the world to the USA and Prussia). The collection was a critical and popular success and enabled Kipling to marry an American, Caroline Balestier. They moved to America, but Kipling did not enjoy himself, seeing the Americans as an "inferior race". They returned to England, where they bought a house in Sussex - a locale which was to replace India as the scene of much of his later work. In 1907, Kipling received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to preach the doctrine of Imperialism until his death, seeing it as the developed world's duty to take on "the white man's burden". Kipling died in 1936, having seen Britain all but lose her Empire.