Title: Scattered tracks on the Lawrence trail
Subtitle: twelve essays on T.E. Lawrence
Description: This book of essays about T. E. Lawrence focuses on questions of an historical nature, mostly pertaining to Lawrence's actions in Arabia during WWI.  The essays are penetrating and offer an abundance of new information.

It is a specialist work, perhaps best appreciated by people already familiar with at least a few Lawrence biographies.  But newcomers to Lawrence can enjoy it too.

The author begins with two accounts of his adventurous and enlightening field research in the deserts of the Middle East.  He thereby answers one little-known but intriguing Lawrence question and settles one long-standing Lawrence controversy.  Then he comes to focus on Richard Aldington's cynical 1955 Lawrence biography, and successfully defends Lawrence against Aldington on many points.  Another essay finally proves, in exhaustive detail, that Lawrence really did undertake his June 1917 Syrian reconnaissance ride, which had long been doubted in the field.  Next is a searching look at the personality of the Bey of Deraa, a Turk who, Lawrence wrote, captured and tortured him one night in 1917.  The author concludes that the available evidence on the Bey very largely supports Lawrence's account of him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  Then comes a critique of a questionable 1990 biography of Lawrence, The Golden Warrior, revealing numerous errors in it.  This essay, and others following it, also focus on Lawrence's account of having been briefly captured in Deraa.  In these several essays the author explores, in great detail, the conflicting evidence surrounding Lawrence's mysterious "Deraa incident" and honestly admits to being puzzled by it all.  In the process, he uncovers much new evidence, which future researchers will have to address.

The stimulating freshness of much of the material in this collection perhaps reaches its peak in a surprising essay titled 'The Failed Rescue of Gasim', wherein the author reveals a Lawrence problem never before even suspected.  It seems that Lawrence's own extant war diaries, while containing abundant evidence of his search for a desert straggler named Gasim (a famous episode in Seven Pillars), contain no evidence at all for an actual rescue of him, and some evidence apparently suggesting the failure of that search.
Subjects: Biography, World War, 1914-1918, Military History, Campaigns, Great Britain, Great Britain. Army, Soldiers
Places: Middle East, Great Britain
People: T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935)