How well do you know your Kipling ?

Can you identify the twenty quotations below.?


I.B.Tauris, the publishers of the new Kipling Abroad edited by Andrew Lycett – published on January 11th 2010 - have offered five copies to the winners of this competition, which involves identifying the extracts below. If more than five people score 100%, the first five to email johnradcliffe@blueyonder.co.uk with their answers will be the winners. Otherwise the five with the highest score will win; where there is a tie, the earlier emailers will win out. We have omitted names which would have made it too easy
to identify the extracts.

The final date for entries is January 10th. 2010


  1. Her forehead struck the bedpost, and she sank, half kneeling, on the floor. It was impossible for a self-respecting man to refrain from kicking her: so (he) kicked with the deadly intelligence born of whisky..…

  2. ... she bowed her head, and I smote it off at the neck-bone so that it leaped between my feet…

  3. “I stooped, and caught the man round the ankles ... The sudden check threw him partially over my left shoulder. I jerked him off that shoulder, still holding his ankles, and he fell heavily on, it would appear, the point of his chin, death being instantaneous.”

  4. ‘Touching the matter of that fish and onions... said (he) ... and sent the knife home under the edge of the rib-bone upwards and forwards. There was a thick sick cough, and the body of the African slid slowly from the bed

  5. ... she raced, with lowered head, straight towards the wall. (he) snatched at her dress, turned her, so that she struck the wall with her shoulder and fell—and (his colleague) came down to find him grappling with her, not inexpertly... They backed her down on the couch at last ... clinging to her knees, while (his) full strength and weight forced the thin arms over her head.

  6. He saw perspectives of heads—gunshot wounds—seen from above and a little behind, as they’d lie on the tables; with the pad over their mouths, but still they all accused him of murder...

  7. ‘I walk down a road, a white sandy road near the sea. There are broken fences on either side, and Men come and look at me over them.’ ‘Just men? Do they speak?’ ‘They try to. Their faces are all mildewy—eaten away,’

  8. There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide across a jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty minutes. A wide sheet of water hurried up to the little terrace on which the house stood...

  9. ... she’d crep’ up an’ up on us, an’ she kep’ creepin’ upon us till we was workin’ knee-deep in the shallers, cuttin’ an’ pookin’ an’ pullin’ what we could get to o’ the rubbish. There was a middlin’ lot comin’ down-stream, too—cattle-bars an’ hop-poles and odds-ends bats, all poltin’ down together…

  10. There was but little light from the stars, and midway to the shoal a branch of the stinking deodar tree brushed my mouth as I swam. That was a sign of heavy rain in the foot-hills and beyond, for the deodar is a strong tree, not easily shaken from the hillsides.

  11. A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear and half wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to hank between the stone facings, and the far-away spurs went out in spouts of foam.

  12. There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet rocks where he could hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the night flowers and the bloom along the creeper buds; dark avenues where the moonlight lay in belts as regular as checkered marbles in a church aisle...

  13. Overhead blazed the unwinking eye of the Moon. Darkness gives at least a false impression of coolness. It was hard not to believe that the flood of light from above was warm. Not so hot as the Sun, but still sickly warm, and heating the heavy air beyond what was our due.

  14. It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog ...

  15. ...Striped blinds, for it was a blazing autumn morning, covered most of the windows,...There were unaging pitch-pine doors of Gothic design in it; there were inlaid marble mantel-pieces and cut-steel fenders; there were stupendous wall-papers, and octagonal, medallioned Wedgewood what-nots, and black-and-gilt Austrian images holding candelabra ...

  16. she noticed that an imitation-lace cover which should have lain mathematically square with the imitation-marble top of the radiator behind the green plush sofa had slipped away so that one corner hung over the bronze-painted steam pipes.

  17. He led me through a wide parquet-floored hall furnished in pale lemon, with huge Cloisonnée vases, an ebonized and gold grand piano, and banks of pot flowers in Benares brass bowls, up a pale oak staircase to a spacious landing, where there was a green velvet settee trimmed with silver.

  18. Its roof was of black slate, with bright unweathered ridge-tiling; its walls were of blood-coloured brick, cornered and banded with vermiculated stucco work, and there was cobalt, magenta, and purest apple-green window-glass on either side of the front door...

  19. The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.

  20. She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard horses’ feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks and grass. It passed close to the shuttered bay window.



John Radcliffe, January 1st 2010