Monday, November 03, 2014

Young Lawrence: A Portrait of the Legend as a Young Man review – compelling, pioneering biography

The Middle East is a source of authentic beauty in Anthony Sattin’s romantic account of TE Lawrence’s early year

  • TE Lawrence in about 1917
Rebel in love: TE Lawrence aged about 29. Photograph: Alamy
“The dreamers of the day are dangerous men,” TE Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” Few dreams could be more dangerous than the desire to free the entire Arab race from its Ottoman chains. Anthony Sattin’s quest in writing the first biography of Lawrence as a young man is to see how a bright, diffident English boy living in a bungalow in the garden of his parents’ Oxford house came to dream so unusually and so seductively.

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