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Book: Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Quotes of Book: Lawrence in Arabia: War,
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  1. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    And how would the Turks defend all that?" Lawrence asked. "No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were {as we might be} an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? … Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked." If alien to many
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  2. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again.
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  3. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    As a boy, he had been obsessed with the tales of King Arthur's court and the chivalric code, had dreamed of leading a heroic life. In the reality of war, however, Lawrence had seen men blown to bits, often by his own handiwork, had left wounded behind to die, and had ordered prisoners to be killed. Just as any thoughtful person before or after him, what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical to the notion of leading a heroic life."
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  4. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    By popular account, on the morning of June 5, 1916, Emir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city's Turkish fort. It was the signal to rebellion, and by the end of that day Hussein's followers had launched attacks against a number of Turkish strongpoints across the length of the Hejaz.
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  5. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    Meanwhile, ibn-Saud was also British India's man in Arabia, with a close relationship going back to before the war.
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  6. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    the 400,000 British dead and wounded at the Somme were double that suffered by the French.
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  7. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    there was just one person in the world who knew the full details of both the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the emerging Sykes-Picot compact, and who might have grasped the extent to which Arab, French, and British goals in the region had now been set on a collision course: Mark Sykes.
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  8. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    All of this would quickly make military considerations in the Middle East subordinate to political ones, and move the decision-making process away from military officers in the field to diplomats and politicians huddled in staterooms. If the chief distinguishing characteristic of the former had been their ineptitude, at least their intent had been clear; with the rise of the statesmen, and with different power blocs jockeying for advantage, all was about to become shrouded in treachery and byzantine maneuver.
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  9. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    To stay in Djemal's good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having assumed the consular duties of most all the European "belligerent" nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential.
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  10. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls-deceptions, in a less charitable assessment-to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders.
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  11. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war's end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo valley, resulting in some 600,000 Italian casualties.
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  12. Scott Anderson _ Lawrence in Arabia: War,

    his son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with sadistic inclinations-which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British-
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