First edition. The documentary-maker and military historian Malcolm Brown (1930-2017), first became interested in T.E. Lawrence in the early 1960s, when he co-produced the television documentary ‘T.E. Lawrence 1888-1935’ (1962) for the BBC, and he went on to publish a number of books on Lawrence, including A Touch of Genius: The Life of T.E. Lawrence, co-written with Julia Cave (London, 1988) and The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (London, 1988). T.E. Lawrence was published in ‘The British Library Historic Lives’ series and ‘[t]his new biography, by a well-known authority on Lawrence, is part fast-moving adventure story, part modern morality tale, and places special emphasis on the years of the desert war – the period that both made Lawrence and broke him. It also shows how the once haloed figure surrounded by hero-worship has increasingly come to be seen as a man of our time, [...] not because he acquired what we now call celebrity status, but because he was prepared to relinquish it’ (dustwrapper blurb).

Although not marked as such, this copy was formerly in the library of the distinguished Lawrence scholar Jeremy Wilson, the editor of T.E. Lawrence’s Minorities (London, 1971), and the author of the National Portrait Gallery catalogue T.E. Lawrence: Lawrence of Arabia (London, 1988) and the authoritative biography Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T.E. Lawrence (London, 1989), of which the last two are listed in Brown’s ‘Further Reading’ on p. 156. Wilson was also the editor of the Whittington Press edition of Lawrence’s Letters to E.T. Leeds (Andoversford, 1988), and the co-founder, with his wife Nicole, of the Castle Hill Press, which has published scholarly editions of works by Lawrence including the ‘Oxford Edition’ of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (also included in ‘Further Reading’). Brown also records his ‘very great gratitude’ to Wilson in his ‘Acknowledgements’ (p. 160), and, shortly after this volume was published, Wilson and Brown served as the joint historical advisers to the Imperial War Museum for the exhibition T.E. Lawrence, the Life, the Legend (2005-2006).

O’Brien sE532.