T. E. Lawrence

This is a good time for Lawrence of Arabia. The West's prickly entanglement with the Middle East has reached a peak of intensity that is likely to last for many years to come. This in turn prompts constant interest in the influence of Lawrence's World War I-era activities. Several Lawrence conferences have taken place in recent years at Oxford University and at the Huntington Library, and a major Lawrence exhibit was mounted at the Imperial War Museum, 14 October 2005–17 April 2006. An excellent international conference on Lawrence and archaeology also took place in April 2006 at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. Doctoral dissertations on Lawrence have recently appeared via the University of Arkansas, UCLA, the Sorbonne and the University of Montreal, and a selection from his Seven Pillars of Wisdom is now included in the Longman Anthology of British Literature.

Meant to accompany the Imperial War Museum exhibit, Malcolm Brown's handsome coffee-table book, Lawrence of Arabia, encompasses all aspects of Lawrence's life and work, and will interest literary readers. A well-written text is accompanied by very striking photos and art work drawn from many private and public repositories in the U.K. and the U.S., including the Bodleian Library, the British Museum, and the University of Texas Humanities Research Center. Some readers will be disappointed that Brown's book is not a catalog proper like Jeremy Wilson's centenary work, which scrupulously detailed the objects in the 1988 Lawrence exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Because many of the same pieces were on display in both exhibitions, Brown (and his publisher) undoubtedly wanted to avoid any repetition of Wilson's earlier work and so opted for a completely different approach. Brown's text lacks a detailed analysis of the objects on display, and does not add new scholarship to what we know of T. E. Lawrence. In my experience, people do not usually read coffee-table books; they leaf through them. But if one actually reads through Brown's book, including the aptly choosen excerpts from Lawrence's letters, and also looks at all of the visuals (some others of which are not readily accessible in other books, although many are) and the informative captions, the result is powerful and striking. Brown makes a convincing claim that while many other strategists of World War I are forgotten, Lawrence is very much in the limelight today, as guerrilla warfare grows ever more dangerous and important. Brown also reminds us that Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which details the evolution of the Arab Revolt of 1916–1918 and Lawrence's part in it, has never been out of print since it was published for a wide audience in 1935, with 60,000 copies sold before publication. Of course Lowell Thomas's famous slide show of the early 1920s and David Lean's film of 1962 have furthered Lawrence's celebrity but the heartening message for literature teachers is that Lawrence's book has had a continuous life of its own over and above any visual version of his story. (Since I have been tracking it over the past five years, Seven Pillars of Wisdom has steadily held the very respectable sales rank on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk of around 5000.)

The individualized style, epic and yet intimate characterization, intense drama and profound psychological and philosophical perception that give Lawrence's major work its impact are also on display in his military writings, which Brown has collected in T. E. Lawrence in War and Peace. Brown explains in his preface that many of the writings in the present volume were also contained in his previous publication, Secret Despatches from Arabia and Other Writings by T. E. Lawrence, which appeared in 1992 but is now out of print. Additionally, many of the writings, including...