'This is a book everyone should read. It is the autobiography of an ace, and no common ace either. The boy had all the noble tastes and qualities, love of beauty, soaring imagination, a brilliant endowment of good looks ...this prince of pilots ...had a charmed life in every sense of the word' - George Bernard ShawSent to France with the Royal Flying Corps at just seventeen, and later a member of the famous 56 Squadron, Cecil Lewis was an illustrious and passionate fighter pilot of the First World War, described by Bernard Shaw in 1935 as 'a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet'. In this vivid and spirited account the author evocatively sets his love of the skies and flying against his bitter experience of the horrors of war, as we follow his progress from France and the battlefields of the Somme, to his pioneering defence of London against deadly night time raids.
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781848325197
Number of pages: 344
Dimensions: 216 x 138 mm
A unique and excellent book by a unique and excellent author. They don't make them like Cecil Lewis anymore... I also recommend listening to him on Desert Island Discs.
Beautiful, poetic, achingly painful, sagacious and, in places, profoundly moving. How on earth did it take me so long to discover this astonishing book?
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