A controversial figure to this day, Lawrence was born in Caernarvonshire and moved to Oxford when he was eight. Educated at the City of Oxford High School and Jesus College, he graduated from Oxford with first class honours in 1910. During vacations in 1909 and 1910 he went to Syria and Palestine to research crusader castles for his Oxford thesis. Between 1911 and 1913 he worked with D.G. Hogarth on a British Museum archaeological dig at Carchemish. It has been suggested that these trips, apart from their archaeological significance, were part of intelligence work. With his knowledge of the Sinai Lawrence was an obvious candidate to join the Military Intelligence Department in Cairo shortly after outbreak of war in 1914. In 1916 he was involved in the Arab Revolt against the Turks, which formed the subject matter of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, first published in a limited edition in 1922. An abridged version with the title Revolt in the Desert was a huge popular success in 1927, but Lawrence withdrew it before a second edition could be put out. The same year Seven Pillars first appeared, Lawrence joined the RAF under an assumed name, and a year later the army tank corps as ‘Private Shaw’. He both enjoyed and affected to disdain the ‘Lawrence myth’ disseminated by the lectures of the American publicist Lowell Thomas. His last foreign posting was in India in 1927.