"It is quiet here now, and I feel as though I were fixed in my cottage for good. It is as I thought ... something is finished with my leaving the RAF. ... It gets worse instead of healing over ... At present the feeling is mere bewilderment. I imagine leaves must feel like this after they have fallen from their tree and until they die." The Last Days of T.E. Lawrence is a chronicle of the time from when Lawrence of Arabia left the RAF up to his fateful motorcycle accident on 13 May 1935. Much of the story is told in Lawrence's own words, from diaries and letters. It covers his time at Clouds Hill, the picturesque cottage in Dorset, where Lawrence intended to retire. Influenced by Lawrence's last and unpublished writing project, "Leaves in the Wind," A Leaf in the Wind reveals his state of mind as he prepared to leave the RAF. Travelling on his Brough Superior motorcycle along a narrow Dorset lane, Lawrence collided with two pushbikes. An official witness told of Lawrence travelling fast, and swerving to avoid a black car coming in the opposite direction. This book painstakingly fits together all the evidence to determine the truth of the motorcycle crash that led to the death of Lawrence of Arabia. For the first time a detailed record is set down covering the last six days before the accident. Meticulously researched by Paul Marriott and Yvonne Argent, their painstaking investigations reveal many new insights into Lawrence's life, activities and interests.

Lawrence of Arabia, as adviser to Prince Feisal, led camel-riding Bedouin in a guerrilla war against Turkey from Arabia to Damascus. The great British hero of World War I, he helped Winston Churchill draw the map of the modern Middle East, creating Jordan and making Feisal king of Iraq. Then, in 1922, he shed the rank of colonel and his name to serve as a private in the Royal Air Force until shortly before his death in 1935 at age 46. Lawrence has been characterized as a man with extraordinary powers and as an imposter who manufactured his own legend. This careful study, based on virtually all published and unpublished English-language sources, sides neither with Lawrence's eulogists nor with his denigrators. Presenting a fair, balanced picture of his life, it shows the lifelong continuity of his puzzling conduct: the often needless deviousness that troubled even close friends; the self-hatred and savage masochism that cursed his adult years.

This is the story of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) as Aircraftman T.E. Shaw at RAF College Cranwell in Lincolnshire from August 1925 - December 1926.

More than one hundred books have been written about T.E. Lawrence which explore the man and his deeds. Just about every aspect and the many incarnations of his life, his campaigns, the geo-politics of the Arab world, and the influence of the West in it, as Lawrence experienced them, have been examined. However, nobody has gone in search of the mind of the man himself – of his formation and his deep beliefs. Nobody has asked the question, What, really, is the source of the extraordinary power of this little man? – not only in terms of his incontestable qualities of leadership, but also in regard to the sheer range of his activities and accomplishments. Archaeologist, writer, guerilla warfare theorist and practitioner, diplomat, soldier and airman, Lawrence also possessed an unusual ability to cross boundaries of class, race, culture, and religion. On top of this, he demonstrated the ability to walk away from power and wealth and the accumulation of things – to change his name more than once; to begin again at the bottom of the heap in the RAF, and stay there, with only a few friends and books and a motorcycle. Lawrence – Warrior and Scholar is a quest. It examines how a slight Oxford academic combined two of the most challenging paths a man can choose. What drove and motivated this man? How was it that he could apparently out-shoot, out-ride, and out-starve the Bedouin? How is it that the US military, and others, are still studying his famous account of the Arab Revolt and his ‘27 Articles’? Drawing upon what Lawrence and those who knew him wrote, and did, and said, Bruce Leigh delves into Lawrence’s personal philosophy and practices, examining and analyzing his library, and his close relationship to the world of classical scholarship and chivalry, emphasizing that Lawrence’s views were not abstractions only, but intimately tied to his actions and deeds. Ultimately, the book argues that there is a message in Lawrence’s writings and activities – one that is against the grain of the world of self-definition by consumption. As one of his friends wrote: ‘The Man was great, the message is greater.’

T. E. Lawrence became world-famous as 'Lawrence of Arabia', after helping Sherif Hussein of Mecca gain independence from Turkey during the Arab Revolt of 1916-18. His achievements, however, would have been impossible without the unsung efforts of a forgotten band of fellow officers and spies. This groundbreaking account by Philip Walker interweaves the compelling stories of Colonel Cyril Wilson and a colourful supporting cast with the narrative of Lawrence and the desert campaign. These men's lost tales provide a remarkable and fresh perspective on Lawrence and the Arab Revolt. While Lawrence and others blew up trains in the desert, Wilson and his men carried out their shadowy intelligence and diplomatic work. His deputies rooted out anti-British jihadists who were trying to sabotage the revolt. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Lionel Gray, a cipher officer, provided a gateway into unknown aspects of the revolt through his previously unpublished photographs and eyewitness writings. Wilson's crucial influence underpinned all these missions and steadied the revolt on a number of occasions when it could have collapsed. Without Wilson and his circle there would have been no 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Yet Wilson's band mostly fell through the cracks of history into obscurity. "Behind the Lawrence Legend" reveals their vital impact and puts Lawrence's efforts into context, thus helping to set the record straight for one of the most beguiling and iconic characters of the twentieth century.

Michael Korda’s Hero is an epic biography of the mysterious,Englishman whose daring exploits made him an object of intense fascination, known the world over as ‘Lawrence of Arabia. An Oxford Scholar and archaeologist, T.E. Lawrence was sent to Cairo as an intelligence officer in 1916 and vanished into the desert in 1917. He united and led the Arab tribes to defeat the Turks and eventually capture Damascus, an adventure he recorded in the classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A born leader, utterly fearless and seemingly impervious to pain and danger, he remained modest, and retiring. Farsighted diplomat, brilliant military strategist, the first media celebrity, and acclaimed writer, Lawrence was a visionary whose achievements transcended his time: had his vision for the modern Middle East been carried through, the hatred and bloodshed that have since plagued the region might have prevented. The democratic reforms he would have implemented as British High Commissioner of Egypt, are those the Egyptians are now demanding, 91 years later. Ultimately, as this magisterial work demonstrates, Lawrence remains the paradigm of the hero in modern times.

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant.An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers.For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl

“We are a much-lectured people,” wrote Robert Spence Watson in 1897. Beginning at mid-century, cities and towns across England used the popular lecture for purposes ranging from serious education to effervescent entertainment and from regional pride to imperial belonging. Over time, the popular lecture became the quintessential embodiment of Victorian knowledge-based culture, which itself ranged from the production of new knowledge in the most elite of learned societies to the consumption of established knowledge in middle-class clubs and the hundreds of humble mechanics' institutions initially founded to provide scientific instruction to workers. What did the “average” Victorian talk and think about? How did the knowledge-based culture of lecture and debate enable men and women to demonstrate both civic engagement and cultural competence? How does this knowledge-based culture and its changing expression give us ways to look at Victorian citizenship long before the extension of the franchise? With engaging and accessible prose Anne Rodrick draws from a variety of primary sources to provide fascinating answers to these pertinent questions. Based on the analysis of several thousand lectures and debates delivered over more than 50 years, this book digs deeply into what those individuals below the most elite levels thought, heard, debated, and claimed as a badge of cultural competence. By the turn of the 20th century, the popular lecture was competing for attention with new institutions of leisure and of higher education, and the discourse surrounding its place in contemporary England helps illuminate important debates over access to and deployment of knowledge and culture.

In February 1942, intelligence officer Victor Jones erected 150 tents behind British lines in North Africa. "Hiding tanks in Bedouin tents was an old British trick," writes Nicholas Rankin. German general Erwin Rommel not only knew of the ploy, but had copied it himself. Jones knew that Rommel knew. In fact, he counted on it--for these tents were empty. With the deception that he was carrying out a deception, Jones made a weak point look like a trap. In A Genius for Deception, Nicholas Rankin offers a lively and comprehensive history of how Britain bluffed, tricked, and spied its way to victory in two world wars. As Rankin shows, a coherent program of strategic deception emerged in World War I, resting on the pillars of camouflage, propaganda, secret intelligence, and special forces. All forms of deception found an avid sponsor in Winston Churchill, who carried his enthusiasm for deceiving the enemy into World War II. Rankin vividly recounts such little-known episodes as the invention of camouflage by two French artist-soldiers, the creation of dummy airfields for the Germans to bomb during the Blitz, and the fabrication of an army that would supposedly invade Greece. Strategic deception would be key to a number of WWII battles, culminating in the massive misdirection that proved critical to the success of the D-Day invasion in 1944. Deeply researched and written with an eye for telling detail, A Genius for Deception shows how the British used craft and cunning to help win the most devastating wars in human history.