George Orwell said that before you could speak about Kipling you had to clear away a legend that had been created by two sets of people who hadn't read his works.

"Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years," he said in 1942. "During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there."

Thirty years after Orwell's essay, Bellamy came up against the current generation of enlightened despisers of Kipling – with what he called their "third-hand opinion on something they'd never read at all". Forty years after Bellamy, they're forgotten and he isn't. And Kipling is still here.