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| | Rudyard Kipling & the god of things as they are by John Derbyshire |
 | | John Kipling seems, from the Holts account, to have been an amiable and rather endearing youth, not especially distinguished in any way, definitely not intellectual (at age fourteen he claimed he had read none of his fathers books), but witty and good-natured, chiefly interested in playing cricket. |
 | | Kiplings god was, in his own words, the God of Things As They Are. To say, in the commonplace phrase, that he had a journalists eye for detail is preposterously inadequate. |
 | | Kipling only ever vented such feelings in private, which indicates that he felt ashamed of them, as of foul languagein respect of which latter, Kipling had found hypocrisy indispensable in his work. |
| www.newcriterion.com /archive/18/mar00/kipling.htm (5002 words) |
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