John Lockwood Kipling, the designer of the front of the Wedgwood Institute in Burslem and a brief cameo character in my novel The Spyders of Burslem, has a major exhibition at the V&A in London until 2nd April 2017. You may have read that the V&A is set to introduce admission charges soon under the new director Tristram Hunt, and I’d suspect it may also offer his distinctively politically correct take on history. But this V&A exhibition is free and (according to The Telegraph) isn’t riddled with political correctness despite its subjects of British design and the Empire.

Picture: J. L. Kipling with his famous son Rudyard Kipling.