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This chapter describes the wartime application of the intuitive intelligence mode in new domains, including policing, colonial administration, and military tactics. The intelligence strategy morphed from a means of gathering knowledge to a means of acquiring political control. As agents strove to fulfill their dreams of adventure in Arabia, they strayed into the realm of warfare, applying their expertise on Arab affairs to the use and theorization of irregular warfare, deception tactics, and airpower, all of which set the Middle East campaigns apart from the war of attrition in Europe. The official construction of Arabia as a “spy-space” where the expert agent knew how to meet cunning with cunning was central in the articulation of these tactics and underwrote the adoption of an avowedly conscienceless approach to involvement in the Middle East.

Chapter 2 traces the literary response to the seductive futurist appeal and colonialist genealogy of air power in two World Wars. After the Great War, the “empire of the air” was celebrated as a last resort of martial heroism and the colonies provided laboratories for experiment. The interwar period saw the consolidating imperial gaze of air power and mechanized war turned on the civilian home front as both apocalyptic nightmare and escapist fantasy. This chapter explores T.E. Lawrence's haunting fantasies of air power as he dedicated mind and body to the RAF's role in policing the empire in the 1920s and 30s. It argues that for those who waged the war of space and movement, the mythology of armored masculinity and panoramic vision all too often resulted in blackout and bodily disintegration. It explores these conflicts of “airmindedness” in the work of Virginia Woolf, Rex Warner, George Orwell, Richard Hillary, and Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris.

Medd examines the correspondence between E.M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence, in which new possibilities of both male intimacy and masculine self-understanding were achieved through an exchange of writing and reading. This epistolary literary exchange eschewed conventions of published literary circulation and reconfigured the traditional reader-writer dyad. As Forster and Lawrence forged a friendship through the exchange of literary materials – including Forster’s ‘unpublishable’ fiction – and a self-reflective dialogue over their experiences of reading one another’s literature and absorbing their interlocutor’s response to their own writing, they negotiated the tricky landscape of male intimacy heightened with homoerotic possibilities, while also discovering and re-imagining new possibilities of (homo)sexual and literary self-understanding. The correspondence constitutes an alternative queer circuit of literary exchange, in which scenes of reading and writing form bonds of male intimacy that re imagine both the terms of masculine identity and desire and the very terms of the literary itself.

This chapter examines the reception of Robert Graves’s translation of Apuleius’s Golden Ass and its relation to his friendship with T. E. Lawrence. A claim in its American publication—that Lawrence carried the Golden Ass with him in Arabia and later introduced it to Graves—turns out to be false, but nevertheless opens up a comparison between Lawrence and Graves as readers of Apuleius. Despite the limited success of Graves’s translation in academic circles, Lawrence’s and Graves’s respective approaches to the novel exemplify two major trends in its among English-speaking audiences since the appearance of Graves’s translation in 1950.

This chapter begins with the Italian invasion of Libya, which reinvigorated the Pan Islam movement, and the French decision to impose military conscription on Algerian Muslims, which set off a new wave of hijra to the east. It moves through World War I, when Algerians served as soldiers and workers in France, and Islamic movements stirred rebellions in the Sahara. During the war, the French organized a pilgrimage to Mecca for North African Muslims, led by Algerians. The Algerian community in Syria was a lively environment, the scene of a debate over whether to trust English support for the Arab Revolt or attempt to negotiate with Young Turk authorities, and of a dynamic movement to promote Muslim girls' education led by Naziq al-̓Abid. On the final day of the war a grandson of ̓Abd al-Qadir who had worked with T.E. Lawrence, then turned against him, was killed by Sharifian forces in Damascus.

This chapter addresses how the First World War revitalised the Hejaz Railway, but not always as the new Turkish government, their German allies, or the British could have foreseen. No one could have predicted the role the faithful railroad would play in the coming conflict, its momentous consequences, or its galvanizing role in creating modern guerrilla warfare. And nobody, let alone the recently volunteered intelligence officer 2nd Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence, could have recognized that Abdulhamid II’s dream railway would be a catalyst for the modern legend of Lawrence of Arabia. The railroad had been a strategic artery since its inception. Despite Ottoman emphasis on its religious role, and its economic and cultural effects along its route, there had always been a geopolitical dimension, as it bypassed the Suez Canal and threatened British India and the Far East. Yet there was nothing inevitable about a war fought along its length. The railroad was to be an unexpected proving ground for a new form of conflict with global reach based on a modern adaptation of traditional Bedouin raiding, itself honed by centuries of attacking Hajj caravans.

This chapter discusses rumors that Ingram might have converted to Islam. It describes his final films and his increasing difficulty in keeping abreast of Hollywood filmmaking techniques. It discusses his friendship with T. E. Lawrence and their shared interest in the desert. It ends with his retirement from filmmaking.

This chapter investigates why Robert Graves so consistently and explicitly adopts a ‘plain-prose’ translation technique even when translating authors as varied as Apuleius, Lucan, Suetonius, and Homer. It considers Graves’s statements on the role of the translator (traditionally seen as a secondary figure, dependent on the individual genius of the original author), and compares these with his view of poets (such as himself) as inspired devotees of the White Goddess. A partial explanation is offered in Graves’s self-positioning vis à vis other translators, such as Samuel Butler and T. E. Lawrence. Particular attention is given to his insistent appeal to Irish and Welsh traditions of poetry, and to his paradoxical status in the 1950s as both established literary figure and self-proclaimed outsider.

This chapter sets out to assess the effects of the militarization of the region’s cartography during the first world war. It calls into question the traditional assumption that the “Middle East” only became an effective category during the Second World War. It reconsiders the history of the creation of the Middle East Department in the Colonial Office and demonstrates that the carving of a new regional entity was one the determining features of the project of a "third Empire". It also demonstrate how maps became both technocratic tools for decision makers and vehicles for propaganda and justifications during the post-1918 peace settlements.

This chapter describes the experience of the British Army during the First World War that was so profound, so terrible, that by 1935 it was talked of only with a sigh of never again. Between the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916 until the fighting on the Western Front finally came to an end in November 1918, over 722,000 British soldiers were dead. As a country long accustomed to the trivial sacrifices of distant small wars, Britain had no psychological preparation for a holocaust of this kind. A new narrative of the war began to form, shaped especially by the self-exculpating memoirs of statesmen such as Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. Their consensus was that it was ultimately the British Army's own incompetent commanders, not the Germans, who had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men of the nation. By the 1930s, Colonel Blimp, a superannuated ignoramus cartoon character created by David Low of the London Evening Standard, had come to stand for everything that had been wrong with the British Army during the First World War; another colonel, Colonel T. E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia”—stood for everything that had been right about it.

Chapter 6 concludes the analytical focusing by arguing for the coherence and compatibility of the five perspectives examined in the preceding chapters. This chapter reveals a story arc that is really a circle, in that it concludes as the book began, by claiming that strategy is a ‘whole house’, and is best represented by Venn geometry. Perspectives of Strategy proceeds cumulatively, adding layer upon layer in exploration of a whole phenomenon of strategy that is a true gestalt. Each chapter in the book offers insight into how and why strategy works, or fails to do so, but argues that it is only the whole story that can make sense. There cannot be, perhaps one should say ought not to be, an intellectual history of strategy, any more than it would be intelligent to propose moral/ethical, cultural, geographical, or technological, histories and theories of strategy. Explanation for the better understanding and competent practice of strategy has to accept as valid the view that accommodates each perspective in this book with its variable relative significance from historical case to historical case.

This chapter explores Graves’s interest in the late antique world of the general Belisarius, subject of his novel Count Belisarius. It evaluates Graves’s use of literary sources, principally the writings of Procopius, in the light of his other historical novels and poetry. It also relates the military content to the author’s Great War experiences and his contribution to modern Great War reception, his friendship with T. E. Lawrence, his fascination with archery, and the deployment of cavalry in both ancient and early twentieth-century warfare. Presentation in the novel of the ancient partners Justinian and Theodora, and Belisarius and Antonina, are considered in the light of Graves’s convoluted relationship with Laura Riding.

And what about Heidegger and Kant and the whole history of Western philosophy? Isn’t the final metaphor for a science that doesn’t think and an imperative that is categorical the vision that we are one day going to be having sex with machines? Isn’t that how we are going to square the circle of the Western mind? For if the circle of it truly enough shows that we are predestinated rather than free, aren’t we going to have to square it by seeking out the ultimate humiliation—Then do that Kantian trick where we turn around and call that humiliation’s endurance our virtue? By going to its final extreme, we will prove our loyalty and our love. In our subjection to a tasteless, faceless, painful sex we will prove our freedom and autonomy of will.

This introduction offers an overview of the basic themes of the book, highlighting the author’s sense of gloom and doom, his view of life as a series of failures in a game of humiliation as the score gets evermore lopsided as one ages. It also provides some autobiography. The chapter’s centerpiece is an account of an embarrassing incident at All Souls College where the author, as in Thor’s visit to Útgarðaloki, found his wine glass connected to the sea. He made a drunken fool of himself before portraits of some of his heroes that graced the walls of the room where the event occurred.