Something of Myself by Rudyard Kipling
Hesperus £7.99

Having served his time in the post-colonialists' purgatory, Kipling is making his way back into the mainstream: My Boy Jack, televised last month, was well received, and a live-action Jungle Book movie is on the way.

Completed by Kipling shortly before his death in 1936, this is a short, raconteurish autobiography, taking the author from childhood in Bombay to global literary celebrity. It includes his time at boarding school, his tour of America, where he lost all his money in a bank collapse, and experiments with an early motor car ('Jane Cakebread Lanchester, I think, was her dishonourable name').

Of course, Kipling's books have never really been out of fashion, and, judging by the puckish, sympathetic man who emerges here, he would have cut a strange figure among the pith-helmeted, quinine-soaked administrators in limbo.