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Coming Up for Air is a novel by George Orwell, published before World War II. It is the most...

Coming Up for Air is a novel by George Orwell, published before World War II. It is the most culturally English of his novels with alarums of war mingling with images of an idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood. The novel is pessimistic - industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there are great, new external threats. As a child, Orwell lived at Shiplake and Henley in the Thames Valley. He was the son of an Indian Civil Servant who was still in India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and later at Eton. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family. In 1936, Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War and experienced modern warfare then, as well as being badly wounded. Orwell was severely ill in 1938 and a friend funded a six-month stay in Morocco during the winter of 1938-1939. Orwell wrote the novel while he was there and left the manuscript at his agent's office within a few hours of arriving back in England on 30 March. It was published almost at once. The themes of the book are nostalgia, the folly of trying