Being T.E. Lawrence
by Joseph Bottum
He was the best of England and the worst. A wastrel, in many ways, and a triumph, in others. A hero and a clown. A scholar and a soldier. A sophisticate and a naïf. A child and a grown-up. He was an adolescent, all in all: perhaps the greatest lifelong teenager the modern world has ever known, with every bit of the soaring self-confidence and crushing self-doubt the awkward years can bring.
His name was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence. Or T.E. Lawrence, as he signed his books, or John Hume Ross and T.E. Shaw, the military pseudonyms under which he was concealed during the 1920s and 1930s — and notice, even in the ways he named himself, the inverted boast and the adolescent fantasy of famously hiding from fame.
Michael Korda. Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. HarperCollins. 762 pages. $36
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