Writing on the Rudyard Kipling centenary of 1965, Burgess points to the poet's resourcefulness and virtuosity, and his admirable stretching of vocabulary to incorporate the exotic and demotic. The Empire should have been recorded in some huge Tolstoyan unity, and Kipling ought to have been the man to do it. 'Many of us want him so much to have sung that finished empire - Britain's only epic theme in a thousand years - that we sometimes dream he actually did it.'