Sagittarius Rising

First published in 1936, this is a Folio Society edition of 1993. Illustrated boards, red slipcase as issued. Some minuscule edge wear to top and bottom of slipcase, looks almost unread, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 230pp. One of 'the definitive accounts of aerial combat, full of passion and poetry’. 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’ so said George Bernard Shaw. Sent to France with the Royal Flying Corps at just seventeen, and later a member of the famous 56 Squadron, fighter ace Cecil Arthur Lewis (1898-1997), 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 defense of London against deadly night time raids. A classic.…