I want you to close your eyes for a second. When
I say the name Lawrence of Arabia, what do you
see? Oh, it's always the same image. I'm willing
to bet money you're seeing Peter O'Toole. You're
seeing those piercing blue eyes, the pristine
white robes. Maybe he's standing on top of a
derailed train in the desert, screaming into
the wind. Yeah, it's pure cinema. It's the ultimate
romantic image. of the British adventurer. It
is. It's an incredible image. It is the image,
and it's a powerful one. But if you actually
met T .E. Lawrence in, say, 1914... you probably
would have looked right past him. Really? Oh,
completely. You wouldn't see a 6 '2 movie star.
You'd see a guy who was maybe 5 '5 on a good
day with a head that looked slightly too big
for his body, a high -pitched sort of giggly
voice, and who was probably covered in dust from
digging in the dirt. That is a bit of a letdown
from the movie poster. Well, that's the thing,
isn't it? The reality of Lawrence is infinitely
more complex and I think much, much darker than
the Hollywood version. We are talking about a
classic hero here. We are talking about an illegitimate
son. who spent his life trying to escape his
own identity, a scholar who essentially invented
modern insurgency warfare. And a man who ended
his life not as a general, but hiding under a
fake name as a lowly mechanic in the Air Force.
Exactly. It's an absolutely bizarre trajectory.
It is. You have the uncrowned king of Arabia
on one hand, and then this guy named Shaw cleaning
oil spills on the other. And today we are going
to try to figure out how those two people are
actually. the same man it's a huge puzzle it
really is we have a massive stack of sources
here his own writings specifically seven pillars
of wisdom and his barracks memoir the mint plus
the biographies that expose the secrets he tried
so hard to keep buried and we need to look at
the military side of this too Because often the
romance of it all completely overshadows the
fact that Lawrence was a ruthless and brilliant
strategist. I mean, he changed how wars are fought.
But to get there, to understand why he did what
he did in the desert, you have to go back. You
have to understand where he came from. You do.
And his origin story is basically a Victorian
soap opera. This is the Chapman secret, right?
I was reading about his childhood and it honestly
felt like the whole family was part of a witness
protection program. That's not far off, you know.
He was born Thomas Edward Lawrence in Wales in
1888. But Lawrence wasn't his real name. It wasn't
his father's name. Right. His father was Sir
Thomas Chapman, an Anglo -Irish baronet, a landowner
with a lot of money, a title, a wife, and four
daughters back in Ireland. But Sir Thomas fell
in love with the family governess, Sarah Jenner.
The classic governess scandal. It was social
suicide in that era. I mean... absolute and total
ruin if it got out. So Thomas Chapman literally
abandoned his estate, his title, his wife, his
entire previous life, and ran away with Sarah.
And they just invent a new name for themselves.
They adopted the name Lawrence, pretended to
be married, and had five sons. T .E. Lawrence,
or Ned, as the family called him, was the second
eldest. So they are living a lie from the moment
he's born. A daily lie. And that shapes everything.
His mother was intensely religious, but also
deeply insecure about their social position.
They moved constantly when the boys were young.
Scotland, Isle of Wight, France, Jersey, always
renting, always a bit isolated. Because they
couldn't risk anyone digging too deep. Exactly.
They couldn't really have guests over because
people might ask too many questions about their
background. Lawrence eventually found out the
truth when he was a boy, and biographers argue
this created a massive chip on his shoulder.
He was technically illegitimate in a society
that valued lineage above all else. It seems
like he compensated for that by trying to be
better than everyone else, harder, smarter, tougher.
I was looking at what he did as a teenager, and
it's just obsessive. Oh, it's beyond obsessive.
Most kids ride bikes for fun. Lawrence was riding.
Well, tell us about the distances. It's masochistic.
That's the only word for it. Hmm. When he was
a student at Oxford, he didn't just study history.
He physically threw himself into it. In 1908,
he decided to write his thesis on crusader castles.
So he took his bicycle to France. And this wasn't
just a trip around the block. He cycled 2 ,400
miles in a single summer. On a 1908 bicycle,
that's a single -speed heavy steel frame on what
must have been mostly dirt roads. Exactly. It's
brutal. And he was doing it on a shoestring budget.
He lived on bread, milk, and grapes. He'd sleep
in haystacks. He pushed his body to the absolute
breaking point, documenting these castles, measuring
the walls, drawing the plans. He wrote letters
home describing the exhaustion like it was a
badge of honor. He was a test. He was always
a test. He was testing the limits of his own
will. And he didn't stop with France. He went
to the Middle East before the war, right? He
did. The next year, 1909, he went to Syria and
Palestine. And this time he walked. He walked.
Over 1 ,000 miles. Through the summer heat, getting
shot at by locals, getting robbed, contracting
a nasty case of malaria. But he kept going because
he wanted to prove a point about military architecture.
He was arguing that the Crusaders didn't just
copy Eastern designs, but actually brought Western
influence with them. But looking back, this wasn't
just an architecture trip. This was training.
He was learning the terrain. He was learning
the terrain, the language, and the people. And
that's what really set him apart. After Oxford,
He got a job at an archaeological dig site in
Kharkhamish, Syria, working for the British Museum
under a man named Leonard Woolley. And this is
crucial? Absolutely crucial. For three years,
he lived in the Middle East. He wasn't in a British
officer's club sipping gin. He was managing 200
local workers, settling blood feuds, dealing
with Ottoman officials, and wearing local clothes
because, you know, they were just more comfortable.
He wasn't a tourist. He was embedded. Deeply
embedded. And he formed a very close bond with
one of the workers there, a guy named Dahum.
Tell me about him. His full name was Salim Ahmed,
known as Dahum. He was a young water boy at the
site. Lawrence took him under his wing, taught
him to read and write. Dahum taught Lawrence
the nuances of local Arabic dialects. They were
reportedly inseparable. Lawrence even brought
him back to Oxford for a visit, which absolutely
scandalized his very proper mother. This relationship
is really the emotional anchor for everything
that comes later in his life. So fast forward
to 1914. The war is looming. The British military
suddenly realizes, hey, we have this quirky little
five foot five guy who knows Syria like the back
of his hand. And he speaks the language. And
they recruit him, but not as a soldier initially.
As a spy? Well, what do you need to cover? Yeah.
The British were terrified that the Ottoman Empire,
which was allied with Germany, would attack Egypt
and the Suez Canal. That was the lifeline of
the empire. And to do that, the Turks would have
to cross the Negev Desert. Right. And the British
military had zero good maps of that area. They
needed to know where the water was. You can't
march an army without water. It's the single
most critical piece of intelligence. So how do
you map enemy territory without starting a war?
You pretend you're looking for something else.
They set up a fake archaeological survey called
the Wilderness of Zin Survey. The cover story
was that they were looking for the path of the
biblical Israelites. That is incredibly cynical
and brilliant. It's perfect, isn't it? We're
just here for the Bible. Pay no attention to
the surveying equipment. So Lawrence and Willie
were sent in. They did write a legitimate archaeology
book from it, but the real job was mapping every
well, every oasis, and calculating the flow rates.
So when the war started, they knew. They knew
everything. Lawrence knew exactly how many troops
the Ottomans could move across that desert because
he knew exactly how many gallons of water the
wells provided per day. It wasn't guesswork.
It was math. So World War I breaks out. Lawrence
is commissioned as a junior officer and sent
to Cairo. He joins the Arab Bureau. And I get
the sense he did not fit in with the regular
army types. He was a nightmare for a traditional
sergeant major. He was sloppy. He often forgot
to salute. He wore his uniform incorrectly. He
was an intellectual, an academic, in a room full
of career soldiers who valued discipline and
spit shine over everything else. But he was useful.
Immensely useful. He spent his time interviewing
Turkish prisoners, drawing maps, and analyzing
the political situation. He was a walking encyclopedia
of the region. And the political situation was
that the Ottoman Empire was vulnerable to an
internal revolt. Right. The Turks ruled over
millions of Arabs who were starting to feel a
sense of nationalism. The British wanted to exploit
that. They wanted the Arabs to rebel against
the Turks to create a distraction, a second front.
And they find a leader for this revolt. They
make a deal with the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein
bin Ali. He was willing to lead a revolt if the
British promised him an independent Arab state
afterwards, covering the Hejaz, Syria, Mesopotamia,
modern -day Iraq. So the revolt starts in 1916,
but it goes wrong. It's stalling. The British
are thinking about pulling the plug. Yeah, it's
not going well at all. The Arabs have some success,
but they're getting bogged down. And so they
send Lawrence down to the Ejaz region to see
if the whole thing is salvageable. This feels
like the moment where the academic becomes the
man of action. This is where Lawrence of Arabia
is born. This is the turning point. He goes down
there, and his job is to find a leader, a real
leader who can unite the tribes. He met Hussein's
other sons, Ali, Abdullah, but he didn't really
click with them. Not the right fit. No. Then
he rode inland to meet Prince Faisal. Lawrence
describes the first meeting in Seven Pillars
as very cinematic. He walks into the tent, and
Faisal, this tall, regal figure, looks at him
and asks, And do you like our place here in Wadi
Safra? And Lawrence's reply is incredible. He
just says, Well, but it is far from Damascus.
Wow. That is a bold opening line. Nice place,
but we have a long way to go. It set the tone
immediately. Lawrence saw in Faisal the charisma
and the vision required to hold the disparate
tribes together. But tactically, the Arabs were
failing. How so? They were trying to fight the
Turks head on. They were trying to capture the
holy city of Medina. The British military manuals
all said the same thing. Capture the city. Destroy
the enemy army. And Lawrence looks at this and
says, That is suicide. Worse than suicide. He
says it's counterproductive. This is his great
strategic insight. He argued, if we take Medina,
what do we get? We get a city full of hungry
civilians that we have to feed. We get a stationary
target that the Turks can just counterattack.
So his plan was, leave the enemy alone. Leave
them in Medina. Let them sit there. Let them
rot. But, and this is the key, destroy the railway
line that feeds them. The Hejaz Railway. Exactly.
Came all the way from Damascus. It was their
only supply line. Lawrence realized that if they
constantly blew up the tracks and the bridges,
the Turks would have to spread thousands of soldiers
all along the line just to guard it. It turns
the Ottoman strength into a liability. They are
trapped defending a piece of metal in the desert.
You've got it. He called it a war of dervishes
against regular forces. He compared the Arab
forces to a gas or a vapor. They should be everywhere
and nowhere. Never a fixed target. Strike the
rail line, blow up a train and then just vanish
back into the desert before the Turks could even
mobilize. This is the birth of modern guerrilla
warfare. It is. It's the template. Don't fight
the enemy's army. Fight his supply lines. Bleed
him dry. I want to get into the weeds on this
because the blowing up trains part is what everyone
remembers. But it wasn't just random destruction,
was it? There was a real science to it. Lawrence
was very, very technical about his explosives.
He turned demolition into an art form. He didn't
just put a heap of dynamite on the track and
hope for the best. So what did he do? He used
a specific technique that he developed, a technique
he called the tulip. The tulip? So instead of
just breaking the rail, he would place a charge
under a metal sleeper. That's the tie connecting
the two rails. When the charge detonated, the
force wouldn't just snap the rail. It would twist
it upwards into this complex flower -like shape.
Ah, I see. A tulip. Exactly. And the genius of
it was that it was incredibly difficult to repair.
You couldn't just patch it or bolt it back together.
You had to cut the whole mangled section out
and rebuild the bed from scratch. It maximized
the downtime for the enemy. And he was right
there doing it. He wasn't ordering this from
a desk in Cairo. No, no. He was the trigger man.
He was obsessed with getting it right. He describes
the sensation of lying in the sand, the heat
of the plunger in his hand, waiting for the train
to hit just the right spot. But the aftermath
must have been brutal. Horrific. He writes about
it in detail. The Turkish soldiers dead and dying,
the chaos, the looting by the Bedouin tribes
who would descend on the wreckage. It wasn't
clean. It wasn't heroic in that movie sense.
It was chaotic and incredibly bloody. This success,
though, it gives him the capital to propose his
craziest idea yet. The attack on Aqaba. Aqaba
was the key. It was the key. It was the last
Red Sea port in Ottoman hands. If the British
could take it, they could land supplies, they
could link up with the Arab forces, and they
could begin the push north to Jerusalem and Damascus.
But it was a fortress. A massive fortress. All
the big guns faced the sea because everyone,
including the Turks, assumed an attack would
have to come from the British Navy. And behind
the city is just nothing. Mountains and the impassable
desert. The sun's anvil, that's what they called
it. No water, brutal heat, deadly snakes. The
Turks didn't even bother to defend the land side
because they thought nature defended it for them.
But Lawrence saw an opportunity. He saw the one
thing no one else did. He convinced Aura Abutai,
the leader of the powerful Hawatat tribe, I mean,
a legendary warrior, to attempt the crossing.
This is the march that nearly killed them. It's
an epic journey. They rode hundreds of miles
in a huge loop to come at Aqaba from the east
from the interior. They ran out of water. Men
went mad from the heat and thirst. There were
constant snake bites. But they made it. They
managed to gather more tribes along the way.
They built a coalition. And when they finally
descended on Aqaba in July of 1917, the Ottoman
garrison was completely, utterly stunned. They
surrendered largely because they were starving
and totally cut off. Yeah. They never saw it
coming. Lawrence then has to ride across the
Sinai alone to tell the British, hey, I took
the city. It's an incredible feat of endurance.
He rode for days with almost no sleep to reach
the Suez Canal. He walks into General Allenby's
headquarters in Cairo, looking like a beggar
covered in dust, and announces that they hold
Aqaba. And then that changes everything. That
moment changed the war in the Middle East. Allenby
realized Lawrence wasn't just a quirky eccentric.
He was a strategic weapon. He gave Lawrence gold,
guns, Rolls Royce, armored cars, whatever he
wanted. He gave him a free hand. But as his fame
and his power grow, his internal state seems
to be crumbling. It is. The pressure is immense.
And we have to talk about Dara. It's November
1917. This is the darkest moment in the entire
story. It's the central trauma of his life. What
happened? Lawrence was reconnoitering a key railway
junction at Dara. He was in disguise, dressed
as a local. He was stopped by Ottoman soldiers.
Now, they didn't know who he was, but they took
him to the local governor, the Bey. And this
is where the account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom
gets very, very difficult to read. It is. Lawrence
writes that he was sexually propositioned by
the Bey. He refused. And then the Bey handed
him over to the guards. And he describes a horrific
assault. He describes a brutal whipping and a
gang rape. He writes, and this is the key phrase,
in Dara that night, the citadel of my integrity
had been irrevocably lost. I know there is a
lot of historical debate about this. Some biographers
like Richard Aldington later on claimed he made
the whole thing up. It is controversial. There
are some timeline issues that skeptics point
to. But most modern scholars and biographers
believe something deeply traumatic did happen
to him there. Whether the details are 100 % accurate
or filtered through trauma and memory, we can't
know. But the psychological impact was real.
Undeniably. The way he writes about it, the shame,
the shattering of his self -worth, the feeling
of being defiled, it rings true psychologically.
After Dera, Lawrence changes. He becomes more
reckless. He seems to be seeking out pain, almost
as if he's punishing himself. And the violence
he participates in gets worse. We see that at
Tafas near the end of the war in 1918. Yes. A
column of retreating Ottoman and German soldiers
massacred the villages of Tafas women and children.
It was an atrocity. When the Arab forces with
Lawrence arrived and saw the bodies, they went
into a frenzy of rage. And Lawrence fed that
rage. He did. He wrote that he told them the
best of you brings me the most Turkish dead.
He essentially ordered, or at least condoned,
a no prisoners policy. They caught the retreating
column and they slaughtered them. It was a war
crime by modern standards. Without question.
It completely destroys the myth of the chivalrous
hero. This was a man consumed by revenge and
exhaustion. And guilt. And immense guilt. Because
we have to remember the whole time, while he
is leading these men, fighting alongside them,
bleeding with them, he knows about the Sykes
-Picot Agreement. Explain that for us. It was
a secret deal made back in 1916 between Britain
and France. Basically, a British diplomat, Mark
Sykes, and a French diplomat, Francois -Georges
Picot, they drew a line on a map of the Middle
East. Just drew a line. With a pencil. They agreed
that after the war, France would get control
of Syria and Lebanon and Britain would get control
of Iraq and Jordan and Palestine. But Lawrence
is telling Faisal, fight for us and you get your
independence. You get a unified Arab state. Exactly.
He knew he was selling a lie. He wrote in a letter,
I am a living lie. He was caught between his
loyalty to his men and his duty to his country's
dishonest politics. So what was his plan? He
hoped that if the Arabs could race to Damascus
and capture it before the British army arrived,
they could set up a government, plant their flag,
and present it to the world as a fait accompli.
He was trying to outrun the politicians. And
they do reach Damascus first in October 1918.
They do, just it's chaotic. Lawrence tries to
set up a provisional Arab administration, but
the geopolitics were just too strong. The French
demanded their slice of the cake as agreed. The
British government caved. Faisal was eventually
kicked out of Damascus by the French. The dream
was dead. The dream of a fully independent, unified
Arab state was dead. Lawrence left Damascus knowing
that the promise he had made was broken. He goes
back to London and he is a broken man. But the
establishment, they want to honor him. There
is this incredible scene at Buckingham Palace
with King George V. It's October 1918. He is
summoned to the palace. He's going to be made
a knight commander of the British Empire. The
king is standing there holding the box with the
insignia. Lawrence walks up. And just says no.
He quietly tells the king that he cannot accept
any honors from a government that had betrayed
its word to the Arabs. Can you imagine the silence
in that room? It was unheard of. A complete scandal.
He told the king he might find himself fighting
against the British forces in the future because
of what they had done. The king was apparently
left just holding the box, totally bewildered.
Lawrence walked out as a plain civilian. But
he couldn't just be a civilian because right
at this moment, the legend explodes. And it's
not really because of what he did in the war.
It's because of an American journalist named
Lowell Thomas. Lowell Thomas is the architect
of Lawrence of Arabia. He's the man who created
the myth. He had gone to the Middle East looking
for a morale boosting story for the American
public. He found Lawrence. And saw a star. He
saw a star. He saw this young, blonde Brit dressed
as a Bedouin. He took these incredibly romantic
photos. And Thomas came back to London and launched
a multimedia show. This wasn't just a lecture,
right? No, it was a sensation. It was held at
the Royal Opera House and Covent Garden. It had
film reels, hand -colored glass slides, a live
orchestra, and Thomas narrating these incredible
tales of the mystery man of the desert. It was
like a blockbuster movie before movies were really
a thing. Absolutely. Millions of people saw it.
It was a global phenomenon. And overnight, Lawrence
became arguably the most famous man in the British
Empire. He was chased by women, by reporters.
He became a brand. And how did he handle that?
He hated it, but he also kind of loved it. It's
complicated. He would apparently sneak into the
back of the theater to watch the show about himself.
He had a very, very complex relationship with
his own fame. So he tries to reclaim his narrative
by writing his own book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
But even that process was a disaster. He lost
the book. It's every writer's worst nightmare.
In 1919, he was changing trains at Reading Station.
He went to buy a newspaper or a sandwich and
left his briefcase on the platform. When he came
back, it was gone. And that was it. The only
copy. It contained the only draft of the book.
Thousands and thousands of words. Gone. So he
just wrote it again? He locked himself in a room
in London and rewrote the entire thing from memory.
It nearly drove him insane. The result is this
dense, philosophical, epic book. It's brilliant,
but it's also a very difficult read. And he wouldn't
make any money from it. Refused. He priced the
private subscription edition incredibly high
just to cover the printing costs. He insisted
on lavish illustrations and fine binding. And
he gave any surplus to the RAF Benevolent Fund.
He called the money he got from the war blood
money. So he wants to escape. He wants to disappear.
And his solution is to join the military again,
but at the very bottom. He craved anonymity.
He wanted to be a number, not a name. In 1922,
he used some high -level connections to secretly
enlist in the Royal Air Force under the name
John Hume Ross. So the hero of the desert is
now scrubbing floors. Scrubbing floors, peeling
potatoes, living in a barrack with a bunch of
18 -year -old kids. He just wanted to be ordinary.
But the press found him. Of course they did.
The Daily Express broke this story. Uncrowned
king of Arabia working as a common private. The
RAF was embarrassed and kicked him out because
it was a circus. And then he ends up in the tank
corps. A miserable time in the tank corps, which
he absolutely hated. He was claustrophobic and
brutal. He eventually pulled strings again and
managed to get back into the RAF, this time as
T .E. Shaw. Shaw being a name he took from his
friend, the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Yes.
And he spent the next decade effectively as a
monk in a mechanic's uniform. He wrote another
book about this period, The Mint. Which is completely
different from Seven Pillars. Night and day.
It's gritty. It's full of slang. The prose is
sparse and direct. It's all about the daily grind,
the discipline, and finding a strange kind of
brotherhood in the machine. And speaking of machines,
he wasn't just hiding. He was actually inventing
things. He couldn't help himself. He had this
restless intellect. He was stationed at Plymouth
and witnessed a seaplane crash. The plane went
down, and the rescue boats they had were too
slow to get there before the crew drowned. And
Lawrence was horrified. He was. He thought it
was an unacceptable failure of technology. So
he started working with boat designers to build
high -speed rescue launches. He spent years testing
engines and hull designs. The resulting boats,
the ST -200 class, were revolutionary, and they
saved countless pilots' lives during World War
II. So even when he's trying to be a nobody,
he's still influencing the military. He couldn't
just sit still. Yeah. Which brings us to his
other obsession, speed. The motorcycle. He loved
them. He owned a series of bro superiors, which
were basically the supercars of their day, the
fastest bikes in the world, any of them George
I through George VII. And he didn't ride them
carefully. He would tear through the English
countryside at 100 miles per hour. He wrote that
it was the only time his mind went quiet, the
only time he could stop thinking. And that leads
us to May 13, 1935. He has just retired from
the RAF. He's living in his little cottage, Clouds
Hill, in Dorset. He rides his brew, George VII,
into town to send a telegram. On the way back,
he's coming over a crest in the road. It's a
blind spot. Suddenly, there are two young boys
on bicycles, right in his path. He has a split
-second choice. He swerves to avoid them. He
clips the back of one of the bicycles, and he's
thrown over the handlebars. He wasn't wearing
a helmet. Nobody did back then. He suffered catastrophic
brain injuries. He lingered in a coma for six
days. and died on May 19th at the age of 46.
It feels so anticlimactic. The man who crossed
the Sinai, who survived torture, who blew up
trains, killed on a quiet country lane. It is
tragic. But there's a strange silver lining to
it. One of the doctors who treated him was a
brilliant young neurosurgeon named Hugh Cairns.
Okay. Cairns was so shaken by seeing this incredible
mind destroyed by a preventable head injury that
he began a massive, years -long study on motorcycle
head injuries among soldiers. And that research.
His research directly led to the British military
and later civilians adopting crash helmets as
standard practice. So in a way, Lawrence's death
has saved countless other lives. So again, even
in death, he changes the world. But his reputation
didn't rest in peace. In the 1950s, the backlash
started. The Richard Aldington biography in 1955,
it was a complete hatchet job. Aldington basically
called Lawrence a liar, a fraud, and a pervert.
He attacked everything. The illegitimacy, the
military claims, the sexuality. It was brutal.
Was there any truth to it? Well, the illegitimacy
was true, obviously, and that was a huge part
of the scandal Aldington created. But the military
stuff. Aldington claimed Lawrence lied about
how many bridges he blew up. or that he exaggerated
his role. And did he? Later research and the
declassification of government files proved that
while Lawrence might have polished a detail here
or there for a good story, and he loved a good
story, the core achievements were absolutely
real. He really was the strategic driver of the
Arab revolt. And what about the sexuality aspect?
That has been obsessed over for a century. It
has. Seven Pillars opens with a famous poem dedicated
to S .A. It starts, I loved you, so I drew these
tides of men into my hands and wrote my will
across the sky in stars. And S .A. is Dahum.
Most historians agree S .A. was Salim Ahmed Dahum,
the boy from Carchemish, who died of typhus just
before the end of the war. Lawrence was absolutely
heartbroken. But was it a sexual relationship?
We simply don't know for sure. Lawrence's friends
and letters suggest he was largely asexual and
had a deep aversion to being touched. However,
we do know about the masochism. This is a difficult
part of his life. It is. After the war, there's
clear evidence that Lawrence arranged for a military
colleague to beat him periodically with a birch.
That paints a picture of someone in deep, unresolved
pain. It does. It suggests he was trying to exorcise
the demons of Dara or perhaps punishing himself
for the fraud of his leadership during the war.
It makes him a deeply sympathetic, tragic figure
rather than just a cardboard hero. So when we
look at the map of the Middle East today, Syria,
Jordan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine. We're looking
at the wreckage of the world. Lawrence helped
build and then saw collapse. We are. He helped
unleash forces, Arab nationalism, Zionism, colonial
partition that are still fighting each other
to this day. He was the bridge between the 19th
century empire and the chaotic modern Middle
East. And as a final thought to chew on. Lawrence
wrote that he acted the part of the Arab leader
for so long that the citadel of my integrity
had been irrevocably lost. He hollowed himself
out to become the legend. The role consumed him.
So the question for you to think about is, was
Lawrence of Arabia the greatest role he ever
played? And in the end, did the character eventually
kill the man? I think he spent the rest of his
life trying to find the man again, but he never
quite could. He was trapped inside the myth.
A heavy thought to end on. That's our deep dive
on T .E. Lawrence. Thanks for listening. Thank
you.