Richard Hillary
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Tanning and foxing
He was a young man who stared death in the face and wrote about it with the clarity of someone who had nothing left to lose — and Richard Hillary is the compelling biography that resurrects his extraordinary life. Written by Lovat Dickson, this meticulously researched work chronicles the short but luminous life of Richard Hillary, the Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot who survived the Battle of Britain only to be catastrophically burned, and who went on to write one of the most celebrated memoirs of the Second World War, The Last Enemy, before dying on a night training flight in 1943 at the age of twenty-three. Dickson, himself a prominent publisher and man of letters, brings a rare literary sensibility to this biography, presenting Hillary not merely as a war hero but as a complex, searching intellect grappling with questions of courage, sacrifice, and meaning in a world at war. The narrative illuminates the tension between Hillary's aristocratic Oxford swagger and the profound transformation wrought by fire, pain, and loss, crafting a portrait of a generation consumed by conflict. For anyone drawn to the literature of the Second World War or the psychology of those who flew in it, this biography poses a question that lingers long after the final page: what compels a man, half-blind and scarred, to climb back into the cockpit?
Author: Lovat Dickson
Format: Hardback
Published: 1950, Macmillan & Co. Ltd
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Tanning and foxing
He was a young man who stared death in the face and wrote about it with the clarity of someone who had nothing left to lose — and Richard Hillary is the compelling biography that resurrects his extraordinary life. Written by Lovat Dickson, this meticulously researched work chronicles the short but luminous life of Richard Hillary, the Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot who survived the Battle of Britain only to be catastrophically burned, and who went on to write one of the most celebrated memoirs of the Second World War, The Last Enemy, before dying on a night training flight in 1943 at the age of twenty-three. Dickson, himself a prominent publisher and man of letters, brings a rare literary sensibility to this biography, presenting Hillary not merely as a war hero but as a complex, searching intellect grappling with questions of courage, sacrifice, and meaning in a world at war. The narrative illuminates the tension between Hillary's aristocratic Oxford swagger and the profound transformation wrought by fire, pain, and loss, crafting a portrait of a generation consumed by conflict. For anyone drawn to the literature of the Second World War or the psychology of those who flew in it, this biography poses a question that lingers long after the final page: what compels a man, half-blind and scarred, to climb back into the cockpit?