“If you spend all your time thinking about how someone is going to one-up you, you can't put your best foot forward.”
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George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, <i>Coming Up for Air</i> is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon.<br><br>George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is an insurance salesman with an expanding waistline, a new set of false teeth - and a desperate desire to escape his dreary life. He fears modern times - since, in 1939, the Second World War is imminent - foreseeing food queues, soldiers, secret police and tyranny. So he decides to escape to the world of his childhood, to the village he remembers as a rural haven of peace and tranquillity. But his return journey to Lower Binfield may bring only a more complete disillusionment ...<br><br>'Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic ... <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four </i>is here in embryo. So is <i>Animal Farm</i> ... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves'<br>John Carey, <i>Sunday Times</i>
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George Orwell
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