Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO (16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935) was a British Army officer, archaeologist, diplomat and writer known for his role during the Arab Revolt and Sinai and Palestine campaign against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

Lawrence's public image resulted in part from the sensationalised reporting of the Arab Revolt by American journalist Lowell Thomas, as well as from Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

[18] Lawrence claimed that he ran away from home around 1905, and served for a few weeks as a boy soldier with the Royal Garrison Artillery at St Mawes Castle in Cornwall, from which he was bought out.

Woolley and Lawrence published a report of the expedition's archaeological findings,[42] but a more important result was their updated mapping of the area, with special attention to features of military relevance such as water sources.

[63] The Arab Revolt began in June 1916, but it bogged down after a few successes, with a real risk that the Ottoman forces would advance along the coast of the Red Sea and recapture Mecca.

[88] His findings were regarded by the British as extremely valuable and there was serious consideration of awarding him a Victoria Cross; in the end, he was invested as a Companion of the Order of the Bath and promoted to major.

[90] But by early 1918, Faisal's chief British liaison was Lieutenant Colonel Pierce Charles Joyce, and Lawrence's time was chiefly devoted to raiding and intelligence-gathering.

[101][102] In 1917, Lawrence proposed a joint action with the Arab irregulars and forces including Auda Abu Tayi, who had previously been in the employ of the Ottomans, against the strategically located but lightly defended town of Aqaba on the Red Sea.

[107] Lawrence avoided informing his British superiors about the details of the planned inland attack, due to concern that it would be blocked as contrary to French interests.

[116] Malcolm Brown, John E. Mack, and Jeremy Wilson have argued that this episode had strong psychological effects on Lawrence, which may explain some of his unconventional behaviour in later life.

"[120] The son of the Governor resident in Dera'a at the time has been quoted as saying the narrative must be false, because Lawrence describes the Bey's hair, while in fact his father was bald.

Thomas produced a stage presentation entitled With Allenby in Palestine which included a lecture, dancing, and music[134] and depicted the Middle East as exotic, mysterious, sensuous, and violent.

[158] In the inter-war period, the RAF's Marine Craft Section began to commission air-sea rescue launches capable of higher speeds and greater capacity.

He felt that in living the life of a private in the Royal Air Force he would dignify that honorable calling and help to attract all that is keenest in our youthful manhood to the sphere where it is most urgently needed.

[167] On 13 May 1935, Lawrence was fatally injured in an accident on his Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle in Dorset close to his cottage Clouds Hill, near Wareham, just two months after leaving military service.

[170] One of the doctors attending him was neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns, who consequently began a long study of the loss of life by motorcycle dispatch riders through head injuries.

"[175][176] The inquest into Lawrence's death was conducted hurriedly and there was conflicting testimony, particularly in the report of a "black car" which may or may not have been present at the scene of the accident, and the behaviour of the bicycling boys.

[192]As a specialist in the Middle East, Fred Halliday praised Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a "fine work of prose" but described its relevance to the study of Arab history and society as "almost worthless.

[196] As Lawrence left for military service in India at the end of 1926, he set up the "Seven Pillars Trust" with his friend D. G. Hogarth as a trustee, in which he made over the copyright and any surplus income of Revolt in the Desert.

[214] There were suggestions that Lawrence had been intimate with his companion Selim Ahmed, "Dahoum", who worked with him at a pre-war archaeological dig in Carchemish,[215] and fellow serviceman R. A. M. Guy,[216] but his biographers and contemporaries found them unconvincing.

[215][216][217] The dedication to his book Seven Pillars is a poem titled "To S.A." which opens:[218] I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me When we came.

[227] He wrote in Chapter 1 of Seven Pillars: In horror of such sordid commerce [diseased female prostitutes] our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies — a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure.

Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort [to secure Arab independence].

Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.

[235] Angus Calder suggested in 1997 that Lawrence's apparent masochism and self-loathing might have stemmed from a sense of guilt over losing his brothers Frank and Will on the Western Front, along with many other school friends, while he survived.

Aldington alleged that Lawrence lied and exaggerated continuously ("Seven Pillars of Wisdom is rather a work of quasi-fiction than history",[237] "It was seldom that he reported any fact or episode involving himself without embellishing them and indeed in some cases entirely inventing them.

"),[238] that he promoted a misguided policy in the Middle East, that his strategy of containing but not capturing Medina was incorrect, and that Seven Pillars of Wisdom was a bad book with few redeeming features.

[239] Aldington argued that the French colonial administration of Syria (resisted by Lawrence) had benefited that country[240] and that Arabia's peoples were "far enough advanced for some government though not for complete self-government.

"[252] This has not prevented most post-Aldington biographers (including Fred D. Crawford, who studied Aldington's claims intensely)[253] from expressing strong admiration for Lawrence's military, political, and writing achievements.

[262] A bronze bust of Lawrence by Eric Kennington was placed in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, London, in January 1936, alongside the tombs of Britain's greatest military leaders.