The standing of Rudyard Kipling, barrackroom balladeer to the common man and poet laureate of the high noon of Empire, has suffered at the hands of our changing social values in the five decades since his death. Now Martin Seymour-Smith has taken advantage of the lifting of constraints so long imposed by the Kipling family with the granting of extensive access to Kipling's personal papers. The resulting biography contains an investigation into Kipling's sexuality as a mainspring of his creativity, and the author's introduction to this edition offers a response to the criticism which his analysis provoked.