A tour of Bateman’s

The film shown at the Society’s meeting on 21 September 2022 can now be viewed online….

A Kipling playlist on Spotify

We have put together this Spotify playlist with a selection of Kipling-related music containing both his verses set to music and music inspired by his works. If there is something you know is already…

Verse on our Facebook page

After three years of posts titled ‘Verse of the Week’, we have over six hundred followers, though with sharing this multiplies up. On March 20th for example, we had a ‘reach’ of more than six…

In the Kipling Library, April 13th

April 13th 2022 at 1800 BST on Zoom: members joined  Dr Toby Parker, the Society’s Honorary Archivist and John Walker, our Hon. Librarian, in a celebration of rare or unusual books and ephemera to be…

Rudyard Kipling, a Secret Life

This remarkable documentary first seen in October 2019 on Sky Arts, is now available on DVD. Its main focus is a fresh and revealing exploration of events from Kipling’s grim childhood legacy of neglect and separation,…

A Diversity of Kipling

On August 12th/13th 2017, for 24 hours, we mounted a 24 hr reading of Kipling’s works, arranged by John Walker, then Chairman of the Society, which was a splendidly successful occasion. A programme of one-hour…

Rudyard Kipling by Andrew Lycett. A paperback edition

Ever since its publication in 1999, Andrew Lycett’s distinguished and deeply researched biography has been a standard work of reference for Kipling scholars and general readers alike. This paperback edition, with a new introduction by…

A battle in Afghanistan

As Charles Carrington recounts (p. 214) in 1894, on holiday in Bermuda, Kipling chanced to meet a sergeant in the Royal Berkshire Regiment who carried him off to the sergeant’s mess. This enabled Kipling…

Rudyard Kipling

This week’s quotations

November 5th to 11th

From his three hundred and fifty stories and nine hundred poems Kipling has contributed more familiar quotations to our language than anyone  since Shakespeare. Here’s another group of three for you to identify …

  1. ‘Be quick,’ said Athira; and Suket Singh was quick; but Athira was quick no longer. Then he lit the pile at the four corners and climbed on to it, re-loading the gunThe little flames began to peer up between the big logs atop of the brushwood.

    ‘The Government should teach us to pull the triggers with our toes,’ said Suket Singh grimly to the  moon.

  2. I slid from the boom into deep water, and behind me came the wave of the wrath of the river. I heard its voice and the scream of the middle part of the bridge as it moved from the piers and sank, and I knew no more till I rose in the middle of the great flood. I put forth my hand to swim, and lo! it fell upon the knotted hair of the head of a man. He was dead, for no one but I, the Strong One of Barhwi, could have lived in that race.

  3. From the black dark Bisesa held out her arms into the moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and the stumps were nearly healed.

    Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, some one in the room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp-knife, sword, or spear, thrust at Trejago in his boorka.

Here are the sources of these extracts


Past Newsletters

 

Newsletters are sent by e-mail to members four weeks before each Society meeting, with details of that meeting and other events, reports on past events, and articles on subjects large and small. Past newsletters are available below, each with an item of particular interest highlighted.

Any member who is not currently receiving an online copy of the Newsletter and would like their name to be added to the mailing list should email the Membership Secretary, Fiona Renshaw, at ksmemsec@outlook.com