Summary
LAWRENCE of Arabi a , Thomas Edward of that ilk but better known as plain TE, was the last hero of his time and ours, a man of fact, not fiction, who thought that he could be a second Alexander, shape great events and reduce an enemy empire into a dozen smaller allies with the gift of liberty.
Here was a man who thought he could dictate to governments, draw the straight lines of modern borders on old maps of the Near and Middle East, give the ancient nation of the Kurds a nation state and invent a new Arabia, in all this contributing more than any other man to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. For this, the region's one unifying element, and for the Turks whose ancient, elegant and educated past it was, he had not the smallest sympathy, and with the fervour of the flagellant that he was to become, whipped up such fear and mistrust of them as had not been seen since the Crusades.See the full content of this document
Extract
Lawrence the Last Hero
Why so? He inherited the romantic, quixotic and Byronic view of the Turk as decadent, ignoble, oppressive and wrongly the holder of the Holy Places of Christianity. To him, the mediaeval crusaders embodied chivalrous nobility, Richard Coeur de Lion's Chateau Gaillard in Normandy was "magnificent marvellous wonderful perfect", and Richard himself "a far greater man than we usually consider him". Of a historical novel on this king, The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, by the now forgotten Maurice Hewlett, publis...
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