MICHAEL WESLEY  |

Michael Wesley takes a look at a new book by Andrew Selth and the story of how a poem by Rudyard Kipling took an empire in retreat by storm.

In May of 2004, Andrew Selth and I were in London. We were both intelligence officials, and had stopped into the city on our way to a conference on new frontiers in intelligence analysis taking place in Rome.

We popped into the big Waterstones bookshop in Picadilly and spent an hour or so browsing. I emerged with several tomes on terrorism and world politics; Andrew came bounding out, eyes shining with excitement, bearing a large book on Burmese textiles.

It can only be this person who could produce a book like The Riff From Mandalay.

Its formal title, Burma, Kipling and Western Music, speaks to all of the bloodless logic of Google searches and citation indexes; a logic that would have forced Kipling to retitle his famous poem “Former Soldier Reflects on Visit to Moulmein”. God help us. In my small act of defiance, I’m going to call this book by the title Andrew obviously preferred, The Riff From Mandalay.

The book is the work of a unique individual: deeply in love with Myanmar in all its aspects; a bibliophile and obsessive collector (who built two extensions of his house to house his Burma collection); a ferocious researcher. There is a story to this book: in the midst of writing a book on the Myanmar Police, Andrew began following a strand of interest in Kipling and music which became all-consuming.

Read the full article “A poem and the politics of high imperialism” article in The National Interest by Professor Michael Wesley, Dean of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.