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W. Empire pod UK.com. Hello, welcome to this very special part two of our Q&A empire podcast where we were inundated with so many questions

and we made our producer cry because we banged on for such a long time.

So we've gone into two parts.

It's not that we had so many questions that we took so very long to answer them.

I think is the honest answer.

We went to off so many little rabbit holes and

sidebars that. Okay so what is question one right this one for you

William Ben Haman I'd love some episodes on the literature from or about the era of empire like the work of

Rajad Kipling, Ian Forster, Paul Scott, Arkay Narayan, Rabhenonat, Gore, Nirot Chaudhudry,

would you consider doing this?

Absolutely, yes.

Any one of those would make a superb episode.

But if I had to just choose one, Raj Kipling, who fascinates me and who's this incredibly complicated

character, brought up in India, sent to England miserable at home, Baba Black Sheep coming out of that.

And then early on in his life writing some incredibly sympathetic accounts.

It's my favorite, or two favorite stories, one of the two is on the city wall, which is this wonderful

account of his life in Lahore, with lots of clearly visiting the dancing girls and experiencing all the the darker

delights of of Lahore and then Kim which one of the great essays on Kim is, I would say, in culture and imperialism wrote this astonishing essay on Kim, because it's a book which is sort of as complicated as Kipling in all in all its ways it's both sympathetic and offensive

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