Kim (Illustrated edition)

In Kipling’s Mowgli stories, the connections between human and animal are complex and ultimately tragic. Mowgli is a link between his village people and the people of the jungle, and like all go-betweens, all liminal figures, he is torn between the two sides, torn apart. There is no common ground between the village and the jungle; they have turned

See, I’m no scholar. I have no special skill in speaking or thinking. I only understand listening and piety; I’ve learned nothing else. If I were able to say and teach this, I might be a wise man, but as it stands, I am only a ferryman, and it is my task to ferry people across the river.

‘Hello,’ he said, intending a reproof. ‘Hello,’ said the boy. He had the ease of a creature never told it was a sinner from the womb.

That Uncle Tom would one day be used as a term of derision (“A Negro who is held to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to whites,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary) she would have found impossible to fathom, and heartbreaking. For her he was something very close to a black Christ. He is the one character in all her book who li