ABSTRACT
It cannot be said that there has been from the beginning a deliberateness of purpose, structure, or psychohistorical interlacing in my work on T. E. Lawrence. On the contrary, the study began late in 1963 when upon getting up from seeing the film Lawrence of Arabia, I remarked to my wife, “I don’t believe he was like that, but he was a very interesting person. Someone ought to do a study.” The work developed piecemeal after that and was tended to intermittently when time permitted. A systematic or cohesive view of the subject seen in a historical context evolved gradually over a period of several years.
