ORWELL BEATS KIPLING HANDS DOWN

I had great fun yesterday at the Oxford Literary Festival at a debate put on by the Orwell Prize on whether George Orwell or Rudyard Kipling was the better or more relevant writer. I was backing Orwell, along with Sarah Bakewell, author of the much acclaimed How to Live - A Life of Montaigne, against the Kiplingites Charles Allen (Kipling Sahib) and Andrew Lycett (Rudyard Kipling and Kipling Abroad) – and the audience backed my lot. The video of the event starts here: I'm the one with ants in his pants attempting to squeeze a talk he knows last 10 minutes into five ...