From earliest childhood, Ned Lawrence knew that his family
was different, ∈ 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
[5] growth. As is well explained ∈ “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 ∈ the second category.
Other books about Lawrence, and a famous film, present
[10] 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, ∈ post –
war negotiations. Mr. Sattin, whose book came out ∈Britain
last October and is only now being published ∈America, looks
[15] instead at Lawrence´s life before that: growing up and studying
∈Oxford, then excelling as an archaeologist ∈Syria and
Palestine.
As a middle-class boy growing up ∈Oxford at the turn of
the 20th century, young Lawrence was secretive as well as
[20] inquisitive, skeptical of received truths, easily bored by mentors
but passionate about medieval history. Piecing together clues
was something he learned early. He knew there was something
odd about his parents´ relationship but could not divine what;
only later did he learn that, scandalously for those times, they
[25] had never married. His father was an Anglo-Irish baronet who
had \left his legal wife for Lawrence´s mother, a governess.
His letters from teenage cycling trips round France
contained lots of information about castles, but only
intermittent signs of real feelings. The same might be said of
[30] the letters he wrote from the Levant. As a result, posterity
is still guessing about what was probably the most important
relationship ∈Lawrence´s life: an Arab youth, Dahoum, who
was just 13 or 14 when they met. If Lawrence ever gave a full
account of his friendship with Dahoum, it may have been ∈ the
[35] memoirs he burned ∈ august 1914.
Mr. Sattin avoids adding to the speculation about the exact
nature of this friendship, but he is defensive about it. “There
was more than paternal care; there was love,” he writes. Like
their subject matter, biographers have to be diggers and
[40] restorers, sifting a mass of evidence and gluing the bits
together. But these bits never quite constitute a whole,
comprehensible human being; much about Lawrence remains
an enigma because he wanted it that way.
(from Books and Arts ∈THEECONOMIST, February 14th – 20th 2015)
In the passage, divine (line 23) means
