ie They are NOT coming from overseas !!
T. E. LAWRENCE
- By Desmond Stewart -
Illustrated with maps and photographs
SBN: 241 89644 4
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, London, UK
Published: 1977
Binding: HARDcover with Dustjacket 352 pages
Condition: UNread & displayed condition! HERE in MELBOURNE! A retired display
copy as illustrated!
Edition: FIRST UK EDITION: 1st printing 1977
TIGHT, SCARCE HARDCOVER WITH ~ IN MELBOURNE ...
WHY do ebayers buy from US?
Because you KNOW what you're getting. My close up photos are of the actual item!!
Remains once read copy - then it was the display copy in a private collection. It is Tight - neat, no inscriptions or marks within. Appears as in my photos - this is the exact copy!! A nicely preserved copy - superb!
Minimal discernible shelf wear, the interior is tight and spotlessly clean with 352 pages. THIS copy is the FIRST UK EDITION: First printing from 1977 - the UK publishing by Hamish Hamilton, London.
There are many black and white photographic plates and map illustrations.
SCARCE title - this is a gently read copy!!
In original pale brown boards HARDcover binding, in publisher's clipped dustjacket which is generally in excellent condition.
(Stored with 2021!)
Measures approx. 9¾ x 6¾ inches or 25 x 17cms
SYNOPSIS ....
Desmond Stewart, Arabic scholar, authority on the Middle East, and biographer of Theodore Herzl, retrieves one of the most ambiguous figures of our century, a self-created legend.
A reassessment of Lawrence's Political & Military achievements. This book is described as a biography by the British historian and journalist Desmond Stewart (1924-1981), the author of a number of works on the Middle East. Desmond Stewart was the first of T. E. Lawrence's biographers to use the Hogarth Papers at St Anthony's College, Oxford extensively.
Besieged by journalists in 1935, one of them asked, 'Do you intend to make yourself Dictator of England?' Absurd as it now seems, the journalist's question was evidence of the extraordinary degree to which Aircraftsman Shaw, the last guise of Lawrence of Arabia - a man without financial backing, organised following or known political ideas - continued to stir the imagination of his contemporaries.
About the Author
Desmond Stewart was a British journalist who worked for many years in Cairo. He wrote a number of books about Egyptian culture and history.
His main novels are 'The Leopard in the Grass' (1953), 'The Unsuitable Englishman' (1955), trilogy 'The Sequence of Roles', 'The Round Mosaic'(1965), 'The Pyramid Inch' (1966), 'The Mamelukes' (1968).
Very Interesting read!
Reviews
"Refeshingly honest in both its new research and its judgements, and of absorbing interest not only as biography but as a study of that fascinating area where fact and fiction mix; the genesisi of a modern myth." - John Fowles.
Our enduring need for fantasies, from even the most improbable of sources ... .. A David Fromkin title led me to this biography. Specifically, Fromkin said: "Lawrence possessed many virtues but honesty was not among them; he passed off his fantasies as the truth. A few months before, he had sent a letter to General Clayton that contained an almost certainly fictitious account of an expedition he claimed to have undertaken on his own." And the footnote indicated Desmond Stewart as the source. Fromkin went on to say: "...(Lawrence) allowed his listeners to understand that he had played the chief role in the Aqaba campaign...Auda abu Tayi, sheikh of the eastern Howeitat, who had in fact won the victory, did not have a name that tripped easily off the tongues of British officers. Instead they said, as historians did later, that `Lawrence took Aqaba.'" There was at least one other fantasy from World War I, which was well-documented in Barbara Tuckman's The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I : it involved the transit of Russian troops, crossing England, during the first month of the war, to reinforce the Western front. When confronted with the utterly senseless slaughter of the Western Front, the commanders who sent their men over the top, the men who complied, the 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the poison gas, the mud, is it any wonder that there was an "understanding" to change the subject, and find a "hero" in the fluidity of movement, and partial successes that was the war in the Middle East? And a publicist, Lowell Thomas, backed by the funds of a coterie of millionaires, devoted to promoting American involvement in the war, found a most unlikely "hero," and re-wrote history in the process.
Desmond Stewart's biography is a well-researched, carefully documented, and restrained exposition of the unlikely troubled character who has now been the subject of over sixty biographies. For sure, I'll never read them all; at most, I might read one more: Michael Korda's Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia . To me, Stewart's work seems to be the definitive one (and alas, seems destined for obscurity). The interest in Korda's would be in studying the techniques of a "spin doctor."
Lawrence was illegitimate, at a time when that mattered. His father left his wife, and the estate in Ireland, to run off with "the help." His father never divorced, and therefore there was no legitimacy in a remarriage. His parents "lived in sin," as the expression had it, spawning him along with four male siblings. The need to conceal this "sin," Stewart suggests, is a prime causative factor in Lawrence's many later distortions of the truth. Lawrence went to Oxford; at the age of 20, in 1908, took a wonderful countrywide bike trip in France that I'd love to emulate. His "chance" commenced when he signed on for archeological work at the Hittite site at Carchemish, northeast of Aleppo. Like others, such as Wilfred Thesiger, Lawrence simply had no interest in women. One of the "attractions" of the Middle East is their ability to take young male lovers. Lawrence, when he was 24, developed a long-term relationship with Dahoum, a boy of 14. Stewart relates what is unquestionably a pedophilic relationship in a remarkably non-judgmental account.
His background in the Arab world led him to the "Arab Bureau" of the British military, in Cairo, during the World War I. He seemed to have a knack for befriending the "right" powerful leaders, and was picked to be a liaison with Hussein, ruler of the Hijaz. Far from inspiring or leading the "Arab Revolt," Stewart, in his low-key way, depicts him as the "bag man." He carried the British gold that greatly facilitated the revolt, and arranged for weapons shipments (but never of sufficient quantity and caliber to make them truly independent, and capable of taking fortified positions.) Carrying the gold naturally made him quite welcomed, but as an infidel, as anyone really familiar with the area knows, he was never in a position of command. Stewart carefully reconstructs the facts, the "knowns," the "probables" from Lawrence's letters, as well as the accounts of others, and provides the evidence which Fromkin addressed above. The most disturbing and jarring fantasy is depicted in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph: The Complete 1922 Text . He claims to have been captured by the Turks, beaten and sodomized. None of it happened. Stewart speculates that it was his utter failure to support Allenby's advance on Jerusalem, by taking out the Turkish railroad viaduct over the Yarmuk River, which led to the subliminal need to be "punished," just like in the English public schools. Subbi al-Umari, a Damascus author who fought with the Arab forces, and wrote "Lawrence As I Knew Him" made a final harsh judgment: that Lawrence deceived the Arabs in his actions and maligned them in his writings. General Edmund Allenby, leader of Allied forces in the Middle East, was equally harsh, calling Lawrence a "charlatan." And no, Lawrence did NOT take Damascus at the end of the war. He walked in the next day.
After the war, as Stewart painfully documents (as it were), Lawrence's life seemed to be dominated by the need for truly masochistic relationships with men, and although he obtained the rank of Colonel during the war, enlisted in both the RAF and the Tank Corps, which helped him be one of the "boys," as well as disguise his true needs. Stewart details the circumstances of his death, in a motorcycle "accident," of which some salient irregularities have never been explained. The death of Frederic Manning, a fellow WWI author of Her Privates We seemed to weigh heavily on him at that time.
Overall, a thoroughly researched, balanced and temperate account, with plenty of bon mots. Stewart even calls Lawrence the fourth Karamazov. Of the 60 bios, this should be at the head of the list. 5-stars, plus.
Marvellous Reading!
WHY do ebayers buy from US?
Because you KNOW what you're getting. My close up photos are of the actual item & form part of my description!!
POSTAGE IS $9.90 WITHIN AUSTRALIA
We pack your books with care - using secure, lightweight, waterproof packaging to ensure that they are well protected in transit.
*All items will be shipped within 3 business days of receipt of payment. Payment can be made by Direct Deposit Bank Transfer or Paypal.
Check out my other items-
*Buyer to make contact within 3 days of auction end and payment within 5 days.
*Cash on pick up is fine.
*Bank deposit & PAYPAL available.
*Any questions? Just ask!
Please look for my other
items in our new Ebay Store
'Jingle Bells Books'
~ as there are lots & lots of old, RARE and COLLECTABLE BOOKS to be cleared from our bookshelves. We're new retirees downsizing from 30+ years teaching & clearing an 80 year, 3 generation private family collection of often valuable books ! *HAPPY TO COMBINE POSTAGE up to 3kilos of BOOKS can post WITHIN Australia for $16.90!
THANKS FOR DROPPING BY