Kipling's Kim: The Great Game and Real Spies with David Richards

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Kipling's Kim: The Great Game and Real Spies with David Richards

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ESU's Greenwich Branch

Save the Date:
Wednesday, April, 26, 2023 at 3:00 PM CT

Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim (1901) introduced the reading public to the romance of the international spy, a story of the Great Game, the contest between Great Britain and Russia for the control of the Indian subcontinent. But was the spy network real, or made up, and what impact did the story have on actual spies, such as "Kim" Philby, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Theodore Roosevelt's grandson, "Kim" Roosevelt? And how did its themes influence literary successors like John Buchan, Ian Fleming, and Le Carré? The long shadow of this story of this Anglo-Irish-Indian orphan falls far forward into international and literary history. Save the date: April 26 at 3:00 pm CT.

About David Richards

David Alan Richards has degrees in history from Yale College and Cambridge University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar, lives in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, and before his retirement practiced real estate law in New York City. He is the author of seven books, including two on the great English poet and novelist he will discuss today—Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind, the catalogue of the 2007 exhibition of his Kipling collection, the world's largest, in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography, published by the British Library in 2010. His next book is I Give These Books: The History of Yale University Library, 1656-2022, appearing this spring from Oak Knoll Press. He is presently serving as the President of the Kipling Society, the first non-Briton to serve in that position.

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