LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. A Triumph

London: Robert Hale, 1966. First Revised Edition With a map and sixteen illustrations on full-page plates. 8vo, publisher's original red cloth, lettered in silver on the spine panel, in the pictorially illustrated dustjacket. [xvi], 15-256 pp. A handsome and well preserved copy, the dustjacket complete with light edgewear, some evidence of old damp to the bottom of the rear portion of the jacket, some offsetting to the cloth adjacent to that portion of the jacket. A FINE BIOGRAPHY OF T.E.L. BY A WELL REGARDED AND PROLIFIC AUTHOR. As Payne writes, "...what was most remarkable about Lawrence was a peculiar sweetness, a gentleness, and a generosity which seem to derive from an earlier age than ours. He had an essential asceticism, a contempt for all the flesh that was not hard muscle. In war he could be ruthless; in solitude, more ruthless still; but the image he left on the world was a man with a dancing gaiety, amused by all men's follies, but chiefly by his own, with an impish delight in pranks. He had his failings, and I have not attempted to hide them in the narrative....He omitted some of his most daring exploits in the pages of SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM, perhaps because he thought the recital of so much improbably bravery would be wearisome to the reader....One remembers the startling beauty of his face, the massive brow, the blue eyes lighting up with a smile of purest benediction. No one ever, I think, combined so much intellectual strength with so much gaiety.