Explore "25" by Beverley Nichols on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Rudyard Kipling is a fine example of a great man who will forgive almost everything to Youth. He certainly forgave me as charmingly as it was possible to do so.
It happened during lunch. I felt very guilty when they said that Rudyard Kipling was coming, because two years before, when still at Oxford, I had written a letter to the _Morning Post_ on the subject of ‘Our Modern Youth,' in which there were a great many violent (and rather silly) remarks levelled against anybody who had the misfortune to be over forty. The letter attacked, with sublime indifference, such diverse subjects as militarism, old age, imperialism, prime ministers and incidentally Kipling, whom I had never read, but who seemed to sum up a great many aggressive tendencies. ‘Where,' I asked, in the peroration, ‘will you find the spirit of the age? Not in the flamboyant insolence of Rudyard Kipling, not in the... etc.'