The most popular author of his day and a paradox who was both an assertive British imperialist and a man of sensitivity and wide reading, Rudyard Kipling is best remembered now as the author of The Jungle Book, the Just-So Stories, and Kim. Fully annotated, volumes 5 and 6 conclude the publication of Kipling's letters, a heroic effort that began with the publication of volume 1 in 1990.

An overview of Kipling's work, his career and postcolonial views on his often controversial position on imperialism.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Kipling among critics who struggle to reconcile the multiple pleasures offered by his fiction with the controversial political ideas that inform it. Peter Havholm takes up the challenge, piecing together Kipling's understanding of empire and humanity from evidence in Anglo-Indian and Indian newspapers of the 1870s and 1880s and offering a new explanation for Kipling's post-1891 turn to fantasy and stories written to be enjoyed by children. By dovetailing detailed contextual knowledge of British India with informed and sensitive close readings of well-known works like 'The Man Who Would Be King',' Kim', 'The Light That Failed', and 'They', Havholm offers a fresh reading of Kipling's early and late stories that acknowledges Kipling's achievement as a writer and illuminates the seductive allure of the imperialist fantasy.

Kipling's letters, never before collected and edited and largely unpublished, are now presented in an annotated edition based on the more than 6,000 letters preserved in public and private collections all over the world. Planned in an edition of four volumes, the Letters reveal Kipling with a fullness and immediacy of detail unmatched by any other source. The first two volumes present the first half of Kipling's life, down to the end of the nineteenth century. They show the remarkable transformation of the young schoolboy into the seasoned Indian journalist, and the even more remarkable transformation of the Indian journalist into the famous writer, the most dazzling literary success of the 1890s. Kipling's hard years of apprenticeship, his restless travels and eager encounters with cities and men, his triumphant struggles in the literary wars, are all vividly set forth. The Letters also take Kipling through his marriage and the births of his children, through the mingled happiness and distress of his American years, to the tragedy of his daughter's death at the very highest moment of his literary fame.

Interpretations of Canada's emerging identity have been largely based on a relatively small corpus of literary writing and landscape paintings, overlooking the influence of the British and American travel writers who published hundreds of books and articles that did much to fix the image of Canada in the popular imagination. In Fashioning the Canadian Landscape, J.I. Little examines how Canada, much like the United States, came to be identified with its natural landscape. Little argues that in contrast to the American identification with the wilderness sublime, however, Canada’s image was strongly influenced by the picturesque convention favoured by British travel writers. This amply illustrated volume includes chapters ranging from Labrador to British Columbia, some of which focus on such notable British authors as Rupert Brooke and Rudyard Kipling, and others on talented American writers such as Charles Dudley Warner. Based not only on the views of the landscape but on the racist descriptions of the Indigenous peoples and the romanticization of the Canadian ‘folk’, Little argues that the national image that emerged was colonialist as well as colonial in nature.

The imperial aspect of Churchill's career tends to be airbrushed out, while the battles against Nazism are heavily foregrounded. A charmer and a bully, Winston Churchill was driven by a belief that the English were a superior race, whose goals went beyond individual interests to offer an enduring good to the entire world. No better example exists than Churchill's resolve to stand alone against a more powerful Hitler in 1940 while the world's democracies fell to their knees. But there is also the Churchill who frequently inveighed against human rights, nationalism, and constitutional progress—the imperialist who could celebrate racism and believed India was unsuited to democracy. Drawing on newly released documents and an uncanny ability to separate the facts from the overblown reputation (by mid-career Churchill had become a global brand), Richard Toye provides the first comprehensive analysis of Churchill's relationship with the empire. Instead of locating Churchill's position on a simple left/right spectrum, Toye demonstrates how the statesman evolved and challenges the reader to understand his need to reconcile the demands of conscience with those of political conformity.