Piers Brendon
Indian Inspiration
Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling
By Charles Allen
Little, Brown 426pp £20 order from our bookshop
Nearly forty years ago I used sometimes to encounter Rudyard Kipling’s only surviving child, Mrs Elsie Bambridge, while walking along the path in front of her stately home, Wimpole Hall, near Cambridge. A solid lady in tweeds, occasionally carrying a shotgun, she would emerge from the red-brick pile (which now belongs to the National Trust) and berate me and my friends for trespassing. Our answer was that we were on a clearly signed public footpath. But she would have none of this, insisting that there was no right of way and that our presence was an unwarrantable intrusion. In the end, as a Kipling fan, I offered to desist if she would show us over the house. She turned away abruptly, seemingly as much appalled by the prospect as by the impertinence. I never saw her again.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2