‘Stranger,’ says Arete in Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey, ‘this have to ask of you from myself; first, What man are you, and where from? Who gave you those clothes? . . . .’ Resourceful Odysseus answered: ‘It is grievous for me, O Queen, to give a connected history of my pains: the celestial gods have given me too many. Yet this I will say to meet your questioning.’ ‘Who gave you those clothes?’ is the question many have asked at the spectacle of Lawrence in the uniform of an Aircraftsman. Here is the answer to the question and the connected history of this Odysseus’ ‘many pains.’

The six hundred letters given in this volume form an enormous book of some eight hundred pages. They are written to bankers, statesmen, artists, children, private soldiers, Marshals of the R.A.F., M.P.s, Under-Secretaries of State; to Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor, C. M. Doughty, Mr. Noel Coward, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and a dozen others as eminent. A single afternoon at Karachi produces four long letters, to the American typographer Bruce Rogers, H. S. Ede of the Tate Gallery, Mrs. Thomas Hardy, and E. M. Forster. Without learning the sensational and the unnecessary we have given us, probably finally, the substantial man in all his complexity. Some indeed of the letters, revealing the depths of suffering to which he subjected himself in the Army, make such painful reading that one might wonder why his friends have given them to the world. It is true that no English figure since, perhaps, Lord Byron had attained so great a ‘news-value’; but this was clearly not the motive of those who loved him and have revealed his confessions to the world.