T.E. Lawrence: Mystery wrapped in an enigma

The Young T.E. Lawrence. By Anthony Sattin. W.W. Norton; 336 pages; $28.95. John Murray; £25.FROM earliest childhood, Ned Lawrence knew that his family was different, in some unspoken way, from other families, and that he was not at all like his four brothers. Such tough beginnings can either inhibit a personality or stimulate its growth. As is well explained in “The Young T.E. Lawrence”, a quirky but rigorous biographical study by Anthony Sattin, a British travel-writer, the man best known as Lawrence of Arabia fell firmly in the second category.Other books about Lawrence, and a famous film, present him as a hero of the first world war who rallied the Arabs to rise against the Ottoman empire, guided them to great victories and lobbied for the Arab cause, with disappointing results, in post-war negotiations. Mr Sattin, whose book came out in Britain last October and is only now being published in America, looks instead at Lawrence’s life before that: growing up and studying in Oxford, then excelling as an archaeologist in Syria and Palestine. Although every phase of Lawrence’s life has mysteries, the early part is less shrouded by...



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