Happy Sunday Reader!

If you were to imagine the life of one of literature’s most celebrated poets, you might picture an introverted soul penning verses in a cramped Parisian apartment, nursing a glass of absinthe in some dimly lit café or hunched over a notebook in an opium-hazed London tavern.

You might not picture a man who was born in Bombay, spent his formative years being systematically abused by foster parents, befriended kings and presidents, and lived with a deep-rooted contradiction that would define everything he wrote.

But that was Rudyard Kipling.

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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born 160 years ago next week, 30 December 1865, in Bombay—now Mumbai—during the early decades of the British Raj. This was the period between 1858 and 1947 when the British imposed colonial rule over India, though British interference under the guise of the East India Company stretched back to 1600.

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Kipling was born into a life of privilege. His father was a professor of architectural sculpture at the Bombay School of Art. He was cared for by Indian servants who indulged his every whim.

In the 1860s, the British Empire was still building a head of steam. Apart from direct rule in India, it held other colonies across the globe, laying the groundwork for later expansion into Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

In 1871, at five years of age, Kipling’s idyllic existence received a jolt.

Rudyard’s parents shipped him and his younger sister back to England. Standard practice—India’s climate and diseases weren’t kind to British children. What happened next, however, was anything but standard.

Rudyard and his sister were placed in a foster home in Southsea. For the next six years, Rudyard was physically and psychologically abused. He would be beaten and spend regular periods in dark, solitary confinement.

By the time his horrified mother returned to England in 1877, the damage was already done. The scars of sustained cruelty would haunt him for the rest of his life.

At United Services College in Devon, a military preparatory school, Rudyard proved hopeless at soldiering but brilliant at storytelling. He discovered a talent for writing stories that readers couldn’t put down. The boy who couldn’t shoot had found his weapon of choice.

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Out of Curiosity

Rudyard Kipling was a first cousin to future British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. He was also a good friend of US President Theodore Roosevelt.

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Rudyard returned to India to work as a journalist before turning seventeen. Over the next seven years, he wrote at a furious pace—short stories, newspaper columns, anything with a deadline. He captured the landscape, the people, the beauty and the brutality of imperial India.

When Kipling returned to London in 1889, he became a literary sensation almost overnight. Works like 'The Ballad of East and West' and 'Gunga Din' captured the British imagination. Critics were comparing him to Lord Byron and Alfred, Lord Tennyson—heady company for a man barely into his twenties.

Kipling moved effortlessly between soldier ballads and Indian tales, between verse and prose. The British public devoured it all. They were hungry for stories from the far-flung empire and Kipling—with his intimate knowledge of India—was perfectly placed to feed them.

1890 was Rudyard Kipling’s year.

A couple of years later, after marrying American Caroline Starr Balestier in London, Kipling moved to her family’s corner of Vermont. There he wrote The Jungle Book (1894)—instant literary immortality.

But immortality wasn’t enough for Rudyard. He kept writing, kept pushing. His fame extended across Europe, Russia and North America through the 1890s.

In 1907, Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature at just 41 years old.

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If you first encountered Kipling's works and read just two of his greatest hits—The Jungle Book and the barrack‑room ballad 'Gunga Din'—you would wonder how the same imagination could inhabit worlds so far apart.

You would also discover a contradiction that ran through Kipling like lettering through a stick of Blackpool rock.

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Kipling was an imperialist to his core. He believed Western empires had a duty to bring order to the world. The British Empire wasn’t just defensible—it was morally necessary.

In 'The White Man’s Burden', he urged the United States to take up colonial rule in the Philippines as a moral duty toward their 'new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child'.

Yet he could write with profound respect for individuals from those same 'sullen peoples'—praising their courage, dignity and resilience in ways that seemed to contradict his own imperial beliefs.

In 'Gunga Din', a British soldier recalls how his Hindu bhishti—a low-status water carrier—is routinely beaten, mocked and insulted as he drags the soldier's goatskin bag through brutal heat and battle.

Despite this, when he is shot and left 'mad with thirst', Gunga Din selflessly rushes through enemy fire to bring him water, bandage his wounds and carry him to safety.

In the act of rescue, the humble bhishti takes a bullet. As he lies dying, the soldier finally grasps what should have been obvious all along:

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In George Orwell’s '1984'—a thinly veiled critique of totalitarianism set in the fictitious Oceania—he introduces the concept of 'Doublethink':

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Was Kipling guilty of Doublethink?

Perhaps. But in his imperial worldview, there was no contradiction: a low‑caste Indian water carrier could be the better man, yet still belong to a people who must be ruled.

By 1910, Kipling remained widely admired across the English-speaking world. But British imperialism had overextended itself and was creaking under pressure from colonial resistance. His imperial beliefs were now marking him as a divisive figure—the 'poetic voice of a racist empire'.

Which makes it all the more extraordinary that Rudyard's most famous work, published that same year, would transcend this growing antipathy to become one of the most enduring poems in English literature.

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One hundred and thirty years ago next week, 29 December 1895, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, a close ally of Cecil Rhodes, led the ill‑fated Jameson Raid from Bechuanaland (Botswana) into the Transvaal—a botched incursion that inflamed tensions and helped set the stage for the Second Boer War.

The unauthorised raid staggered on for just five days when Jameson surrendered and was shipped back to Britain to face trial and a brief spell in prison.

Keep calm and carry on.

Kipling was fascinated by Jameson’s resilience in the face of total humiliation—his self-control, his refusal to complain, his tenacity in dusting himself off and starting again. (Jameson went on to become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1904.)

It was this resilience that inspired Rudyard to write his most iconic work, 'If—'.

The poem is a guide to being a decent human being in an indecent word, to staying upright when the world is tilting sideways. Some of those lines have become among the most quoted in the English language:

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'If—' was later published in 1910 in Kipling’s collection, 'Rewards and Fairies'.

The poem was an immediate hit; reprinted in newspapers, quoted in speeches and taught in schools. British officers memorised it as a personal code of conduct. When World War I broke out four years later, 'If—' became the definitive morale-boosting text.

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Today, the poem appears on workplace walls, in school corridors, on locker room doors and in the endless doomscroll of motivational social media posts.

For some, If— has endured because it transcends imperialism, offering advice that resonates across cultures and generations.

For others, it remains rooted in Victorian imperial values. The universal language isn’t so universal. Stiff upper lips and stoic self-control personify the very mentality that enabled empire and its brutalities in the first place.

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Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most complicated figures in English literature. His work celebrated imperialism at its peak. He was a man of his time—a fact, not an excuse.

George Orwell insisted that Kipling was a 'jingo imperialist' whose work showed 'not the slightest sign of disapproving the brutalities of empire'.

Salman Rushdie, the contemporary Indian-British novelist, at least acknowledged the contradiction: "I have had many of the difficulties with Kipling that a lot of people from India have, but every true Indian reader knows that no non-Indian writer understood India as well as Kipling."

Rudyard Kipling was a brilliantly gifted storyteller whose fierce defence of empire sat so uncomfortably alongside his genuine empathy for India. Once the world has settled its account with four hundred years of European empire and subjugation, perhaps we will then understand Kipling’s place in literary history. Not before.

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Kipling continued writing until his death on 18 January 1936, just two days before his friend King George V. He was 70 years old.

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Dates with History

Next week…

Four hundred and twenty-five years ago next week, 31 December 1600, the East India Company received its Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I. The charter granted a group of London merchants the right to pursue profits in the spice trade and luxury goods.

What started as commerce hardened into conquest. By 1800, the Company had raised a private army, larger even than Britain’s own, and was annexing territory. By the mid-19th century, this corporate empire governed most of India, extracting wealth on an unimaginable scale.

Everything changed in 1857, when the Indian Rebellion forced the British government’s hand. The Government of India Act of 1858 stripped the East India Company of its powers and its Indian territories were transferred to the British Crown, ushering in the era of the British Raj.

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This was the India Rudyard Kipling was born into seven years later: no longer run by profiteering merchants, but by the apparatus of formal empire. The Company’s commercial exploitation had been replaced by something the British convinced themselves was more noble—imperial duty.

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Also next week...

In November 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen was experimenting with cathode rays in his laboratory at the University of Würzburg when he noticed something odd: a fluorescent screen across the room was glowing, even though his cathode ray tube was covered in black cardboard.

Whatever was causing the glow, he called them 'X-rays'—'X' for unknown.

On 22 December 1895, one week before the disastrous Jameson Raid mentioned earlier, Röntgen asked his wife, Anna Bertha, to place her hand on a photographic plate while he trained his new X-ray apparatus on it for 15-20 minutes.

When she saw the image—her hand bones clearly visible, her wedding ring floating eerily on a skeletal finger—she reportedly gasped, "I have seen my death!"

The photograph became the first medical X-ray in history.

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Röntgen had made a discovery that would revolutionise medicine and earned Anna a place in history (well, a hand at least). Within months, X-rays were being used in hospitals across Europe and America.

Röntgen received the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his discovery of X-rays. He refused to patent the new technique, insisting that such knowledge should belong to the world and serve humanity freely.

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Question of the Week

The Russian author Boris Pasternak took over ten years to complete this book, first published in Italy in 1957.

The novel was banned in the Soviet Union and wouldn’t be released there for over thirty years.

The love story—set between 1903 and 1929—covers the tumultuous period through the Bolshevik Revolution and beyond.

In 1965, the story was adapted into a film starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie that would become a cinematic legend. Lara’s Theme became one of the most recognisable melodies in film history.

What is the name of the book?

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And Finally…

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born in 1452, in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, about 20 miles west of Florence.

Da Vinci needs little introduction. Being remembered as one of history’s master painters would have been enough for most people. But it wasn’t enough for him.

Leonardo filled thousands of pages with sketches, observations and inventions. He designed military fortifications, engineered canals and studied human anatomy by dissecting corpses (not for the squeamish).

Da Vinci held a particular fascination for birds and the science of flight. There are stories of him buying caged birds at the market just to set them free, watching intently as they took to the air. His notebooks were filled with observations on wing beats, spiralling air currents and the mechanics of flying.

The dream of human flight consumed da Vinci.

From a handful of cryptic lines in Leonardo’s notebooks, historians pieced together the story of an attempted trial of a flying machine near Florence, 530 years ago next week, 2 January 1496.

The details are sparse, but what we do know suggests da Vinci’s thinking on flight had come a long way by the 1490s. He’d clearly graduated from sketching wings and watching birds to the considerably more serious business of asking a human being to climb aboard an untested flying machine to see what happened.

Leonardo’s earliest schemes for human flight took the form of large articulated flapping-wing machines (referred to as Ornithopters) and the aerial screw, a giant corkscrew designed to drill its way upward through the air.

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Whichever type of machine may have been tested that day, it faced the same inescapable problem; human muscle power, no matter how efficiently applied, could never generate the force needed to sustain flight.
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Out of Curiosity

If you take another look at the aerial screw image above, you may notice something odd: The writing is back to front. This is not a printing error—Leonardo actually wrote backwards. Thousands of pages that you could only read by holding them up to a mirror.

Was it a secret code to protect his genius from rivals? Or was he just a left-handed man who'd worked out how not to smudge ink across the page?

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Leonardo’s sketches and calculations turned out to be remarkably prescient. He’d worked out that birds create lift by altering the air pressure above and below their wings—no small feat for the 1490s. He had also noticed how they could turn, climb and steady themselves in gusts through tiny, precise adjustments to wing camber and tail angle.

Da Vinci’s designs for parachutes, gliders and a screw-driven helicopter contained principles that wouldn’t be successfully realised for another 400 years.

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Thank you for joining me. To those celebrating Christmas this week—Happy Christmas. For those who don’t but live in a country that does—happy two weeks off watching other people celebrate Christmas.

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To everyone else, may the next two weeks be happy, peaceful and entirely free of tinsel.

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

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Question of the week… answer

Boris Pasternak's masterpiece is called Doctor Zhivago, which he wrote between 1945 and 1955.

The love story doubles as a metaphor for Russia’s own conflict between tradition and revolution.

Yuri Zhivago—a married doctor and poet—falls hopelessly in love with Lara, a nurse he meets during World War I. Their passionate but doomed affair unfolds amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the couple ultimately torn apart by circumstance rather than choice.

While the romance captivates readers, the novel is really a poet's perspective on the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and what happened to the individual spirit under Soviet rule.

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The controversy surrounding the book led to Pasternak's expulsion from the Soviet Writers' Union.

The author died in 1960, largely ostracised, having never seen his masterpiece published in his own country.

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