M.M.Kaye, author of The Far Pavilions, demonstrates in her foreword that Rudyard Kipling could seek no more convinced and sympathetic an advocate than herself. She introduces us to Kipling's India and looks at the influences in his life that were responsible for his becoming the literary lion of the Empire. Kipling was the barrack-room balladeer and the unrivalled poet laureate of the common man. He was born in Bombay in 1865 and after schooling in England, returned to India and started his writing career. He settled in Sussex after the Boer War and concentrated on verse and short stories.