Research & Discussion
General biography
Rejected legend
Youth 1888-1914
War service 1914-1918
Diplomacy 1918-1922
Service years 1922-1935
Lawrence's personality
Writings and criticism
Lawrence and book production
Film, TV, radio
Book reviews
Bibliography & Collecting
Obituaries
Discussion list
Review commentary by Jeremy Wilson on Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia by Michael Asher
(London, Viking, 1998)
previous page | Page 21 | Chapter 3
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Chapter 2: Dominus Illuminatio Mea |
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| 30/1/15 | "the school fear hanging over one - that haphazardly suspended punishment which made my years between eight and eighteen a misery." The reference for this (reference 23) is completely wrong. It points to a letter to Charlotte Shaw printed in Malcolm Brown's Letters page 305, in which there is a passage about Lawrence's schooldays; but it is not this one. In reality the "quote" appears to be a corrupt transcription from The Mint part 2 chapter 19, penultimate para: "there is the school-fear over me, that working against hazardously suspended penalty which made my life from eight to eighteen miserable, and Oxford, after it, so noble a freedom." |
| 30/1/17 | "Far from being the 'delight and profit' she might have wished, Sarah destroyed Lawrence's life and made certain that he would never achieve happiness or fulfilment." I don't in the least agree with this statement, which seems to me to be simplistic psycho-babble. The highly speculative sentences that follow are hardly better, e.g. "in her own mind she [Sarah Lawrence] was still the terrified little girl who would never know why she had been so heinously abandoned to the whims of the dark universe." This is complete fiction. |
| 30/1/end of page. | The unstated source for Asher's story about Sarah Lawrence and A. W. Lawrence's marriage is John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, Boston, Little, Brown, 1976, p. 474 note 50 (the story is accurately quoted/summarised here). A.W. Lawrence's sense of confusion, assuming that it was not pure coincidence, would have resulted from his anticipation of her reaction, rather than thought-transmission between England and Greece. |
| 31/1/11 | "his great task in life was to escape from her." Surely a greatly over-simplified conclusion? |
| 31/2 | Neither the exact date, nor the duration, nor the precise cause of Lawrence's boyhood enlistment are known. It is reasonable to point to the various factors that might have played a part, but hardly in quite so certain a manner as Asher: "Sarah disapproved [of Lawrence's wish to switch from mathematics to history], sensing instinctively a move away from her. The matter became contentious". This sentence too is fiction. Next page. |
T. E. Lawrence chronology
1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales
1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys
1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909
1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish
1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo
1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt
1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference
1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office
1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF
1923 January: discharged from the RAF
1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps
1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant
1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah
1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published
1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey
1929-33: stationed at Plymouth
1931: started working on RAF boats
1932: his translation of the Odyssey published
1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe
1935 February: retired from the RAF
1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May
1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset