Kipling is not at all like his image, which is a good thing, since he is widely regarded as jingoistic, narrow and racist. It is a pity if, for this reason, some never read him.

Kipling was always an outsider, and never a member of the Establishment. He received the Nobel Prize, but refused any honour, including the Order of Merit, that would identify him with a single country.

He wasn’t English, being born in Bombay, 150 years ago, on December 30 1865. A repeated pattern in his life was to turn his back and begin again. He never returned to India after the age of 25. He made a home in Vermont, but, after an almost fatal illness and the death of his daughter Josephine, left America forever in 1899. He pinned his hopes on English rule in South Africa, but, disgusted with the ascendancy of the Boers, left in 1908 and never went back.

In his writings, as if in a recurrent dream, small male groups offer shelter from a hostile world: the schoolfriends of Stalky & Co; Mowgli’s wolf-pack in The Jungle Book; or the Janeites in a short story from the First World War.

As Andrew Lycett points out in a new collection, Kipling and War, the term Janeites, meaning “admirers of Jane Austen”, was invented by Kipling’s friend George Saintsbury.

'To me England is a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries’

Who would expect to find them behind the sandbags of the Western Front? But the narrator of the story tells how Macklin, a drunken mess-servant, joins in the officers’ discussion of their heroine.

“Pa-hardon me, gents,” Macklin says, “but this is a matter on which I do ’appen to be moderately well informed. She did leave lawful issue in the shape o’ one son; an’ ’is name was ’Enery James.”

Rudyard Kipling - the misfit poet

It wasn’t from the First World War that Kipling learnt of life’s brutal horrors, but from a boarding house in Southsea, Hampshire, where he went to live in 1871, aged five, separated from his parents in India and cruelly treated, physically and mentally, by the landlady.

This went on for more than five years, no unusual ordeal for the children of Empire, but for this boy “an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar”.

To these years in the House of Desolation (as he calls it in his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep”) Kipling attributed his “habit of observation and attendance on moods and tempers”, as he noted in his fragmentary autobiography, Something of Myself.

No doubt also in Southsea was ground into his psyche the sadism that regularly emerges in his work. One story in Stalky & Co, on the torture of two bullies, is too terrible to reread.(Stalky & Co is sometimes mistaken for children’s literature, since its subject is school, but it isn’t, any more than is Kim, the dreamlike tale of a boy in India.)

How Kipling seemed to a brilliant contemporary is shown by the parody “PC X36” in Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912). The narrator’s policeman friend Judlip spotted an old man with “a hoary white beard, a red ulster with the hood up, and what looked like a sack over his shoulder” standing on a rooftop.

Ordering him down to the street, the constable grabbed his collar. “The captive snivelled something about peace on earth, good will toward men. 'Yuss,’ said Judlip.

Kipling did often refer to the Law, but his version is the Law of the Jungle, or of schoolboys, or soldiers, or hunters

'That’s in the Noo Testament, ain’t it? The Noo Testament contains some uncommon nice readin’ for old gents an’ young ladies. But it ain’t included in the librery o’ the Force. We confine ourselves to the Old Testament – O T, ’ot. An’ ’ot you’ll get it. Hup with that sack, an’ quick march!’ ”

Beerbohm is right about the often annoying rendering of dialect and the petty violence, but he puts his finger on a more important feature of Kipling’s world: its rejection of Christianity. Kipling lost all that in the Southsea boarding house.

It didn’t seem to trouble late Victorian readers who had seen their tide of faith ebb on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867). Kipling did often refer to the Law, almost as if it were the Law of Moses, but his version is the Law of the Jungle, or of schoolboys, or soldiers, or hunters.

The Law may be unjust to an individual caught up in its workings, but it is ineluctable. In his poem Recessional (marking the diamond jubilee of the Queen and Empress Victoria in 1897), the “lesser breeds without the Law” are not the natives on whose behalf the White Man takes up his burden; they are rival empire-builders such as Russia and Germany.

Kipling won the Nobel Prize but refused any honour that would identify him with a particular country Credit: Ullstein bild

Recessional was included, surely mistakenly, in The English Hymnal, compiled in 1906. Perhaps the editors judged it by its form, that of a prayer, and overlooked its content: a caution against national hubris.

It is not for political theory that Kipling is read, but for his astonishing prose (notably in short stories) and his poetry.

He had burst on London in 1889 after six long years as a journalist in India, but still only 23 (if already acquiring the balding Alf Garnett look). Success was immediate, and new bestsellers joined reprints of stories published in India.

“Readers who had not heard of Kipling at the beginning of 1890,” notes the Kipling scholar Thomas Pinney, “could have a whole shelf of Kipling by the end of 1892.”

“His touch is uncanny,” says Daniel Karlin, whose edition of Kipling’s stories and poems has just been reissued. “He can evoke a taste, a smell, a look, a human expression with immediate and infallible conviction, so that reading him is often a series of delighted assentings.”

Yes, the female labourers walking north along Grand Trunk Road in Kim, for example, are overpoweringly real. “A solid line of blue, rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in haste, would swing up through the quivering dust,” overtaking the boy and his companion.

Kipling at work Credit: Roger-Viollet/ Rex Shutterstock

But I find that a response as frequent as delight to Kipling’s convincing reality is tears. Indeed he himself sees tears, not rationality, as the distinguishing mark of humanity.

In The Jungle Book, when Mowgli has grown up and proved himself master by the use of fire, he feels something he has not experienced in his lupine upbringing: “What is it? What is it?” he said. “I do not wish to leave the jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?”

“No, Little Brother. That is only tears such as men use,” said Bagheera. “Now I know thou art a man, and a man’s cub no longer.”

Kipling’s style, like Stevenson’s, interrupts a Victorian post-prandial slumber with a briny bucketful of North Sea water.

Like Hardy, he pulled off the rare double of matching virtuosity as a storyteller with inventiveness as a poet. The mistake now is to discount his poetry because familiarity with so many quotations breeds contempt.

Sadism was ground into his psyche in the boarding house where he grew up

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations included 331 of his: “If you can keep your head…”; “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that…”; “Brandy for the Parson, / Baccy for the Clerk…”;“Ship me somewheres East of Suez…”; “What should they know of England who only England know?”

Yet, as Juliet Townsend pointed out when the new edition of his poems (in three volumes) came out in 2013, Kipling always stretched the boundaries of rhythm and rhyme, as in “Song of the Galley-Slaves”:

The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt-cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut to the gums, and you whipped us because we could not row. Will you never let us go?

That came in Many Inventions (1893), in the first flush of London fame. But he did not fall like the skyrocket’s stick. After turning his back on America, and soon before doing the same to South Africa, he found a bivouac in an old house in Sussex – and in 1904 bought a car.

“The chief end of my car is the discovery of England,” he wrote. “To me it is a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries.” The upshot was Puck of Pook’s Hill, an uncategorisable work, in prose and poetry, weaving a sort of mythical history for England.

Its air is halfway between Tolkien’s Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Masefield’s The Midnight Folk. Perhaps both authors had fed their imaginations with it. Kipling did not succumb in America to the pneumonia that killed his daughter and nearly killed him.

Kipling's writing had 'an uncanny touch'

But the First World War brought sorrows that never abated. In 1915, his son was reported missing in action (a cruel way of losing him, since his mother long hoped he might be wounded or a prisoner).

Even then, Kipling wrote superb war journalism, much of it for The Daily Telegraph, from unfamiliar fronts, in Alsace, the Dolomites or at sea. For his last 25 years he suffered stomach pains.

His teeth were pulled out (in line with the latest scientific theory of “septic foci”). He was operated on for a twisted bowel he did not have. He died quite suddenly in 1936, from a haemorrhage of the stomach ulcer that had been there all along. Now that his world seems so utterly changed and distant, perhaps readers will discover it with more wonder.

Order Kipling and War ed by Andrew Lycett and Rudyard Kipling: Stories and Poems ed by Daniel Karlin from the Telegraph bookshop for £16.95 and £10.99 plus £1.99 p&p