Word: took
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...white staff, and since his married chief dined at home and he at the club, heard daily what his readers thought of him. The manifold duties of his job, the consciousness of being an English sahib, matured Kipling precociously. He was green, but not for long. "My Chief took me in hand and for three years or so I loathed him. He had to break me in, and I knew nothing." He lived with his family, but often had the house to himself when they were away in the Hills; he had his own servant, his own rig, all that...
...stuff; soon there were half a dozen paperbacked books signed Kipling on Indian railway bookstalls. By now Kipling had some money saved up. He turned his back on India and apprenticeship, returned to England to dip his fiery pen into the Thames. Almost immediately the Thames took fire. At 24 Kipling was the literary man of the hour. He cannily steered clear of cliques, ran foul of no colleagues. "I have never directly or indirectly criticized any fellow-craftsman's output, or encouraged any man or woman to do so." He walked into success like a happy somnambulist: "That...
...troops, he raised quarter of a million pounds for them from the royalties of some popular verses (The Absent-Minded Beggar). Very British about the Boers, he recalls that De Wet with 250 men, Smuts with 500, were handy fighters; "but, beyond that, got muddled." After the war he took a house for his family at Cape Town, next to Cecil Rhodes's, wintered there for seven years. Kipling's best-known poem, If,* which has been translated into 27 languages, was based on the character of Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, of Jameson Raid fame. Much...
...something "worthy to lie alongside The Cloister and the Hearth"-but that had not been vouchsafed him. On the other hand he had written some books that he knew were good: "My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw." Friends will add to that list; critics may subtract. In Something of Myself, Kipling's Daemon was not with him; he had long vanished over the horizon. But Kipling still followed, marching as to war, helmeted with the crescent of Islam, armored...
...thoroughly aroused brother and sister took their curious case to court. Proceedings were further complicated by Oliver's shady behavior, by Jane's counter-machinations, by the untoward fact that Edith, Jane's girlhood friend and business partner, who owned a controlling share in Jane's prosperous theatre, fell in love with Oliver. Altogether it took two trials, a dramatic second auction, a happy and an unhappy marriage, brisk detective work and some stiff psychological third degree before the Antigua stamp found its rightful owner...