The open book and the Latin phrase form part of the heraldic coat of arms of Oxford University, and it is perhaps the most fitting memorial to Lawrence, who grew up among the ancient walls and towers of Oxford, and whose character was formed by it more than by any other single element, perhaps the most extreme example of the scholar turned hero in the eleven centuries of its existence.

* A full set of equipment consisted of large pack, small pack, webbing belt, ammunition pouches, canteen and bayonet holders, rifle sling, and all the straps that held everything together; it had to be assembled in an exact pattern, brass buckles gleaming.

*Clare Sydney Smith would eventually write a touching book about her friendship with Lawrence, The Golden Reign.Nancy Astor (Viscountess Astor), the first woman member of Parliament, had a relationship with Lawrence that was certainly flirtatious—she was the only woman who rode pillion behind him on his motorcycle—but she was rather too formidable a personality to be described as a flirt.

* “Bus,” like “kite,” is RAF slang for an aircraft, particularly a multiengine bomber or transport, and by extension also a motor vehicle of any kind.

* Lawrence printed 128 “complete” copies (with all the illustrations) for the subscribers, as well as thirty-six complete copies and twenty-six incomplete copies (the latter lacking some of the illustrations) to give away to friends, plus twenty-two copies without plates and certain textual omissions to go to the George h. Doran Company in New York, some to secure U.S. copyright, others to be offered for sale at the prohibitively high price of $200,000 a copy (about $3.2 million in today’s money). of these copies, Lawrence kept six. ( Letters, 295, 466, quoted in hyde, Solitary in the Ranks.)

* Perhaps more than any other single title, Revolt in the Desertensured the survival and profitability of its U.K. publisher, Jonathan Cape.

* Lawrence had met robert Graves when Graves came up to Jesus College, oxford, as an undergraduate after the war (in which he had served with distinction as an infantry officer, and which he would later describe in Goodbye to All That). Graves had by then already achieved some fame as one of the British war poets, and he would go on to write more than 140 books before his death in 1985 at the age of ninety.

* By this time Lawrence had changed his name by deed poll to Shaw. Legally and officially he had abandoned the name which his father had chosen on leaving ireland, and which Lawrence himself had made famous. it made little difference, of course—to most of the world he remained and would always remain “Lawrence”—but it at least removed the objection of some officers to the fact that he was serving in the ranks under a false name.

* The figure of 5100,000 in 1927 would be about $1.6 million today; Ј5,000 would be about 5375,000.

* All this may sound familiar to the reader eighty-two years later.

*Those who favor this policy today (in much the same area where Lawrence was in 1928) should bear those doubts in mind. Whether by biplane or by drone, bombing people’s villages and killing their wives and children will inflame, not put down, an insurgency.

* The luxurious liners of the Peninsula & orient Steamship Company were the preferred way of traveling to and from Britain to the British colonies in the east; they played much the same role as the French Messageries Maritimes.

* Lawrence was embarrassed by the excessive generosity of this gift, even though it turned out that some of his wealthy friends, like Buxton and Curtis, had also contributed toward it, and in the end decided to pay for it himself. Buxton, ever the astute banker, had managed to get Brough to agree to a discount (Lawrence was his most famous customer), so the final price was ₤144 four shillings and sixpence (₤144/4s/6d),or about $7,500 in today’s money.

*The author was stationed for a time in the early 1950s at the Joint Services School for Linguists in Bodmin, Cornwall, about thirty miles northwest of Plymouth, and frequently quently rode his motorcycle up to London for the weekend in under six hours; he can vouch for the fact that on the roads in existence before the motorways were built, Lawrence was pushing it.

* At that time (and up until 1940) any large formation of aircraft was known in every air force in the world as a “Balbo,” after the spectacular long-distance, large-formation flights Balbo had led to publicize italy’s aviation strength.

* The Schwerpunktwas the central aim of German strategy, the focal point against which must be directed the maximum concentration of force to effect a breakthrough. The concept was characterized in World War ii by General Guderian’s comment,kleckern, klotzen!(“Don’t fiddle around, smash!”).

† London: Cassell, 1938.

*Alexander Korda (1893—1956) was the author’s uncle. Zoltan Korda (1895—1961) was the middle brother; and the author’s father, Vincent Korda (1897—1979), the youngest brother.

*Photographs of Clare Smith generally show her wearing a smart beret with a diamond brooch, not at all the kind of hat expected of a group captain’s wife in Singapore.

*To his credit, Baldwin did authorize expenditure on what would come to be called radar and on the eight-gun monoplane fighter (the Spitfire and the hurricane), but that was because they were presented to him in the most unobtrusive way by professionals he trusted. The task of “reorganizing” Britain’s defenses was not put into the hands of one person until April 1940, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin’s successor, most reluctantly made Winston Churchill chairman of the Committee of Service Ministers and Chiefs of Staff, in addition to his post as first lord of the admiralty.

EPILOGUE

Life after Death

Lawrence is in the select group of heroes who become even more famous after death than they were while alive. The Library of Congress lists more than 100 books about him, of which fifty-six are biographical, and that number does not include several children’s books, two very successful plays, a major motion picture, and a television docudrama, as well as numerous Web sites devoted to his life and work. As Lawrence had feared, “the Colonel,” as he sometimes called his former self in a spirit of derision, just keeps marching on, despite every effort on Lawrence’s part to kill him off. Doubtless, if he had had his way, Lawrence would have been buried with the name T. E. Shaw inscribed on his headstone, but his brother Arnold stood firm in opposing that, and so it is as T. E. Lawrence that he lies in Moreton churchyard, and is commemorated by sculptures of various sizes in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral; at Jesus College, Oxford; at the City of Oxford High School; and in the tiny church of St. Martin’s, near Clouds Hill, where Eric Kennington carved a life-size recumbent effigy of Lawrence in his Arab robes and headdress, his hands crossed over his Meccan dagger as if in prayer, very similar to the medieval effigies of knights, crusaders, and their wives that Lawrence had photographed in his childhood.

The limelight that Bernard Shaw had warned him about has never dimmed, and he remains as famous now as he was seventy-five years ago, and perhaps even more controversial. In part this is because there exists a flourishing Lawrence cult, fueled by the Lawrence legend, that has kept an apparently endless number of controversies going on the subject of Lawrence, many of them created, not always inadvertently, by Lawrence himself. As early as 1929 he had predicted, in a letter to a friend, “I am trying to accustom myself to the truth that I’ll probably be talked over for the rest of my life: and after my life too.”

After Lawrence’s death his brother Arnold was bombarded by letters from admirers who saw Lawrence as the central figure of a new religion, in which they hoped Arnold might play the role of Saint Paul. Even before his death Lawrence was painted by “an Austrian-born religious artist named Herbert Gurschner” as a gently smiling, beatific religious figure in RAF uniform with a beggar’s cloak like that of Saint Francis thrown over his shoulders, against a lush background of Egyptian religious symbols. His left hand is raised in a kind of casual blessing, and through the long, graceful fingers of his right hand run grains of golden desert sand.