ALL MY YESTERDAYS. An Autobiography (ISBN:1852304057)

Element, Shaftesbury. 1993. 1st. edn. Hardback in unclipped dustwrapper. Lge 8vo. viii, pp210. Orig blue cloth, gilt to bumped spine. 14 b/w photo-illus. Former-owner's neat signature to fep. Bar stated faults VG in like d/w with some wrinkling to upper edge. In this book "He recounts his survival, flying with the Royal Flying Corps over the front line of the Somme Battle in 1916 and following this, almost without pause, taking up the romantic and unheard of assignment of travelling to Peking to teach the Chinese to fly! But the high-spirited adventure of these early days is followed, even more remarkably, by Cecil Lewis's lucky chance of helping to found the BBC. To have been in at the start of two of the greatest social developments of Western civilisation - flying and broadcasting - would have been enough to fill out many men's lives. For the next twenty years, until he reaches 70, Lewis tells of his full involvement in the ideas of Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and the book is an account of how this inner growth affected the rest of his life. Gurdjieff's work is now widely recognized throughout the world, but a good deal of what Lewis has gained from it has not yet been fully recognized for what it is; a guide of great importance in the future destiny of Western civilisation."