This is a very attractive Folio Society volume of Kipling short stories that span his entire career. It one of the many Folio volumes that I’ve recently liberated from my late Dad’s collection. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything of Kipling’s before, which is an oversight, since he’s one of Sussex’s most famous authors, and I’ve been to his house, Batemans, many times. Half of the stories, and Kipling’s career, are set in the India of the British Raj, and are the most colourful, exotic, and historically interesting. The Man Who Would Be King is of course the most famous of these, a glorious tale of imperial entrepreneurship and hubris. But there’s also Without Benefit of Clergy, a tender tale of a tragic interracial love affair, In the Rukh, the first appearance of Mowgli before The Jungle Book. The rest of the stories are set in Edwardian and early 20th C. Britain. There’s the pathetically touching semi-autobiographical Baa Baa Black Sheep about the cruelty of sending small children away from their parents to school in England. My Son’s Wife, a very modern feeling story of an urban sophisticate seduced by the conservative pleasures of the countryside. It could almost be the inspiration of Blur’s Country House. And then there’s A Madonna of the Trenches, a very moving story of shell-shock and ghosts set in the trenches of WWI, where of course Kipling’s son lost his life. Sometime the Victorian wordiness gets a little tiring, and I gave up on one story, written in 19th C. soldier’s slang, as just too much like hard work. But when Kipling’s good he’s very good and on the whole I thoroughly enjoyed this volume.