T.E. Lawrence’s younger brothers, Frank and Will, were killed on the Western Front in 1915; Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written between 1919 and 1926, tells of a very different theatre of the same war — the campaign against the Turks in the Middle East, a story that encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends amid the stink and corpses of a disgusting makeshift ‘hospital’ in Damascus. As Angus Calder writes in his introduction to this edition, ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War’. Far from a Boys Own Paper tale of Imperial triumph, it is a complex work of serious literary ambition that stands in the tradition of Melville and Dostoevsky, alongside the writings of Yeats, Eliot and Joyce.
ISBN 13: 9781853264696
Author: T. E. Lawrence
