To the degree that the British right hand didn’t know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that...
For the next ninety years, the vast and profligate Saudi royal family would survive by essentially buying off the doctrinaire Wahhabists who had brought them to power, financially subsidizing their ac...
Had worked so hard to bring about, that Lawrence was suddenly
I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again.
He wasn’t sure what to do. If he left the rock, it would only take a few minutes of desert air to dry his pool, and then all that would remain of him would be a small crucible of brown powder, a powde...
Was a master of the PowerPoint presentation nearly a century before it existed.
Nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the
What Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical t...
The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.
Mold—William Henry Yale also subscribed to Roosevelt’s notions of the ideal American man and of the dangers of over-civilization, code for effeminacy. The true man, in this worldview, was a rugged ind...
The 400,000 British dead and wounded at the Somme were double that suffered by the French.
The British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment—whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or som...
And for all concerned there was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of free trade, the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the confli...
This must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting t...
In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows wit...
Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government’s secret policy in the Middle East—that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises t...
By popular account, on the morning of June 5, 1916, Emir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city’s Turkish fort. It was the signal to reb...
As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements … a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, a...
Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves.
And how would the Turks defend all that? Lawrence asked. No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a...
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