From the NS archive: Rudyard Kipling 25 January 1936: The writer of empire in changing times. In this piece, written a week after the death of Rudyard Kipling, Rebecca West, one of the magazine’s most incisive critics, took a hard look at the great fabulist and poet’s career. “Some of his work was gold; and the rest was faery gold,” she writes. Kim was a great work but by no means all his novels succeeded: “… all his life long Kipling was a better poet than he was a prose writer, though an unequal one”. The reason for Kipling’s fame was that his work was “superbly relevant to its time”, notably “the emphasis on colour in his style, and the vast geographical scope of his subject matter, which made his work just the nourishment the English-speaking world required in the period surrounding the Jubilee and the Diamond Jubilee”. But there were numerous character faults too, thought West, including his blithe patronising of the working man and his rages against changing times. However, Kipling deserved his fame because “he alone among professional writers had travelled widely, and had the trick of condensing his travels into evocative runes which are almost as much magic as poetry”.