George Orwell's 1941 statement ‘Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking’, tells less about Kipling than about his own talent for plain-man epigrams, proving how right at the time was the description of the writer of ‘The Wish House’ and ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ as the ‘Kipling that nobody read’.1 Kipling's work from 1919 to 1936 displays extraordinary energy and variety, especially coming from an ageing man who was often in severe pain from a duodenal ulcer (undiagnosed and therefore untreated until 1932). True, Orwell's slightly patronizing summary of the elderly Kipling's politics (‘Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this’) is more or less right. Kipling certainly deplored the Versailles Settlement as much too soft on Germany and was furious about the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921, the post-war activities of nationalists in India (he was one of General Dyer's supporters after the 1919 Amritsar massacre), the increasing political ascendancy of the USA and what he regarded as the Socialism of post-war England (i.e. the mild Labour reformism of Ramsay MacDonald and Baldwin's Conservative-dominated ‘National Government’). But he took little part in public life after the war except in his work for the War Graves Commission and, more indirectly, through his friendship with King George V for whom he wrote the first radio Christmas message for the Empire, broadcast on Christmas Day 1932. On the other hand, unlike the dominant Tory ‘appeasers’ of the 1930s, who regarded Nazi Germany as a bulwark against international Bolshevism, Kipling detested Hitler whose rise to power inspired his prescient political poem ‘The Storm Cone’ about the English ship of state threatened by a long and deadly tempest (‘The storm is near, not past;/ And worse than present jeopardy / May our forlorn to-morrow be’: W, 834). The same reason moved him to remove from his book covers his old trademark the Hindu good-luck swastika as now ‘defiled beyond redemption’. As David Gilmour has rightly argued, Kipling had much in common with Winston Churchill and his loathing for Nazi Germany was both a patriotic English response to the resurgent power of the ‘Hun’ and an intuition of evil.