I recently read
Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was odd how I kept prefacing it with "The" but there is no "the". Yes there are lots of names of people and
places and I found myself referring many times to the
maps. I did find some of Lawrence's philosophising passages hard to follow but his strong intention to minimise casualties comes across well and his descriptions of the landscape are quite beautiful. I would have liked my edition to have some modern colour photos of the landscape as well as the rather grainy photos from the period. The book is quite different from the film which is more hyped up and has some important inaccuracies - most of the time they were blowing up the Hejaz railway and its
bridges rather than engaging in pitch
battles.