When you buy a used copy YOU SAVE
Carbon Dioxide
1.45Kg of CO2
Water
181 litre(s) of Water
Tree
0.0109 Tree(s)
donate
1 book donated to global literacy projects

The Long Recessional :The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling

3.70 ( 71 Ratings by Goodreads)
The Long Recessional

The Long Recessional :The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling

3.70 (71 Ratings by Goodreads)
hardback
Published: 7 March, 2002
Standard worldwide delivery by Tue, July 14 - Fri, July 17
Order within 0
Condition: USED
$9.00
RRP $30.13
You save $21.13 (70%)
Price includes shipping
Available 2 in stock
- +
FREE Returns within 30 days

Description

Rudyard Kipling was a unique figure in British history, a great writer and at the same time a great imperial icon. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature and added more phrases to the language than any man since Shakespeare, whilst his poems incarnated an era for millions of people who did not normally read poetry. A child of the Victorian age of imperial self-confidence, Kipling lived to see the rise of Hitler threaten his country's existence. The laureate of the Empire at its apogee, he foresaw that its demise would soon follow his death. His great poem Recessional celebrated Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897; his last poems warned of the dangers of Nazism. The trajectory of his life matched the trajectory of the British Empire from its zenith to its final decades. He himself was transformed from the apostle of success to the prophet of national decline, a Jeremiah warning of the dangers that successive governments refused to face. While previous studies of Kipling have concentrated on his writing and on his domestic life, this book studies his public role and his influence on the way Britons saw both themselves and their empire.Based on extensive research in Britain and in the under-explored archives of the US, David Gilmour has produced a study of a man who embodied the spirit of his country a hundred years ago as closely as Shakespeare had done 300 years earlier.
Prizes

Winner of Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography 2003

See more

More Details

Type Book
ISBN13 9780719555398
ISBN10 0719555396
Number Of Pages 362
Item Weight 739 g
Product Dimensions 160 x 34 x 241 mm
Publisher / Reseller John Murray Press
Format hardback
See More +

Media Reviews

"Gilmour tells the story well and brings out the contours of Kipling's "imperial life" more clearly than previous biographers." -- The London Magazine

Show more

GoodReads Reviews

Author's Bio

David Gilmour's books include the prize-winning biographies, Curzon and The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa. He is also the author of Cities of Spain, The Hungry Generations and several works on the politics of Spain and the Middle East. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, he is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He lives in Edinburgh.

Show more