Who wrote The Jungle Book?

Rudyard Kipling, published in 1894 and written largely in Vermont, where he was living with his American wife - so a book saturated in India was composed in a New England winter, from memory and from what he had absorbed growing up in Bombay until he was five.

Those first five years and what followed explain a great deal about him. He was sent to England at six and boarded with a family who treated him badly for six years, an experience he wrote about with real bitterness. He returned to India at sixteen and worked as a journalist, which is where the ear for how people actually speak comes from.

He is a genuinely difficult figure and worth being straight about. He wrote some of the best short stories in the language and was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; he also wrote The White Man's Burden, and was an enthusiastic imperialist whose politics are inseparable from the work rather than a detachable flaw. Orwell's essay on him - calling him a jingo imperialist and morally insensitive, while conceding he was a better writer than his critics - remains about the most honest summary anyone has managed.