Robert Powell

The extraordinary life and times of Rudyard Kipling from idyllic earliest memories of India to the horrors of the First World War.

Rudyard Kipling is one of the most intriguing and controversial of all our great writers. We explore the many different worlds inhabited by this great storyteller and poet through his autobiographical writings, stories and verse, (all interwoven with music of the period) including his traumatic childhood years at the hands of a cruel foster-mother, seven years hard in India as a journalist learning the writer's trade, early years of married life in Vermont, where he observed America and the Americans with an increasingly ironical eye, his time as a war-correspondent in his beloved South Africa, and, finally, settling in his dream house in Sussex, where he became obsessed with English history, taking an enormous pride in our heritage, which he illuminated with poems and verse on themes from Roman times to his own day.

At the same time he was becoming increasingly concerned with the fragility of the English way of life, which he, with chilling accuracy, foresaw as being threatened by a terrible Armageddon approaching.

When his fears were realised in the outbreak of the First World War, Kipling became one of the great chroniclers of that time, in his moving, often painfully eloquent stories and poems.

He was the great spokesman for his age, a time dominated by a sense of imperial destiny, which was soon to be destroyed forever.