In his later years, Kipling’s ventures abroad were mainly for the sake of his health, or in connection with his work for the Imperial War Graves Commission. This inspired some descriptive passages of great poignancy, including the extract from the short story ‘The Gardener’, set in a still raw war cemetery in Flanders and quoted in this collection.

Andrew Lycett, as a distinguished biographer of Kipling, is well qualified to bring together a wide-ranging selection of his writings in poetry and prose, fact and fiction. The extracts from letters are often the most revealing, less formal in tone, but with the same conscious search for the most vivid word or phrase which distinguishes all his work. The passages are arranged according to geography rather than chronology, and each chapter has a short and interesting introduction, explaining the place of that particular part of the world in Kipling’s life. Kipling despised what he called ‘Globe-trotters,’ who prided themselves on ‘doing India’ in ten days, but he did a good deal of globe-trotting himself, and in this book we can travel with him.

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