Original subtitles

WHOOPING AND SCREAMING

Thomas Edward Lawrence -

the brilliant British Army officer

depicted in these exhilarating moments from the movie classic

Lawrence Of Arabia.

It was 600 miles on a camel and, I mean, really extraordinary.

He's seen as a military visionary who led an Arab uprising...

Lawrence adapts guerrilla warfare to the circumstances on the ground.

..and changed the world forever.

The British and the French are able to negotiate the portioning

out of these Arab territories.

But Lawrence is one of the most enigmatic figures

of the 20th century.

Those deep-rooted cross-currents and contradictions.

It's mainly because of that that we find him so fascinating.

Was he a man simply running from his past?

They hid what at the time would've been considered a dark secret.

They were masquerading as a normal family.

A man tormented by doubts about his identity?

He was describing abuse that was physically

and sexually painful, but that he may have enjoyed.

How much was Lawrence driven by escapist fantasy?

Lawrence's mind is full of these sort of heroic images.

This is a real life quest.

His journey took him into the heart of a Middle East

transformed by monumental forces.

What you end up with is these boundaries,

often cutting across through tribes, through ethnicities.

They don't really make any sense.

A lifetime of guilt was Lawrence's reward.

Arab expectations are really absolutely dashed.

There is a great sense of disappointment and betrayal.

This is the story of the real Lawrence of Arabia.

For a decade and a half, until his death in 1935,

Thomas Edward Lawrence,

Lawrence of Arabia,

is the most famous man in England.

He counts kings among his friends.

His name sells newspapers in their thousands.

But the most famous man in England might easily be the unhappiest.

TE Lawrence is running for his life.

He runs here, Clouds Hill,

a tiny primitive cottage in Dorset,

a refuge from the fame that is killing him.

I think it was a case of wanting fame,

but when it arrived, he didn't like what it looked like.

It was very uncomfortable for him.

He would sometimes sit absolutely silent and not move

from the same position all morning - not move, not say anything.

He was really very depressed.

Lawrence retreats.

He retreats from the limelight,

but I think he's also retreating into himself.

His Dorset retreat is also a place to write,

a place to try and make sense of the fame that has so unsettled him.

Letters to friends punctuate his progress.

"I've found a ruined cottage.

"I've roofed it and am flooring it.

"At present, one chair and a table.

"Too many people talking to me.

"Can't write."

The Lawrence myth turned a strange, solitary man

into an international celebrity.

That myth had been born as an exhausted and broken Europe

had dragged itself through the last bloody days of the First World War.

The British and the French are struggling on the Western Front.

And not only do you have France experiencing what became

known as "the mincing machine" of Verdun, but you also have the

infamous Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest day in the history

of the British Army, with almost 20,000 dead in a single day.

Lawrence's legend has chance beginnings.

He is a minor figure in the British war effort in the Middle East

when America joins the conflict in 1917.

At the same time,

the US government wants good news stories to sell the war at home.

A slick New York journalist gets a call.

Lowell Thomas was an American journalist who was sent out

to get copy, really, that might

persuade American boys to sign up for the war.

Went first of all to the Western Front.

Found nothing but mud and guts and appalling things,

so he thought, "Oh, dear, this is no good."

Alerted to what sounds like a more marketable war being fought

1,000 miles to the east, Thomas and his cameraman wash up in Cairo.

Here, the British, under General Allenby,

are fighting the Ottoman Turks.

Initially, Lowell Thomas goes out with his camera, and he takes some

great shots of Allenby marching up and down

and lots of British soldiers.

And then he becomes aware of this character, this young officer

who was having exploits,

sort of Boys' Own adventure stuff in the desert.

"As this young Bedouin passed by in his magnificent royal robes,

"the crowd in front of the bazaars turned to look at him."

The "Blond Bedouin", as Lowell's tabloid instincts christen him,

is Thomas Edward Lawrence.

He gets permission to go and film him

and immediately sees that this is cinematic gold.

This guy's wearing robes, there are camels.

This is going to sell well to the great American and British public.

So, in 1919, he started up this picture show called

With Allenby In Palestine And Lawrence In Arabia.

And after a while, he began to see that people were more

interested in the Lawrence in Arabia bit.

So, he dropped the Allenby In Palestine

and called it With Lawrence In Arabia.

Lowell's travelogue is a genuine multimedia experience -

film,

colour stills,

studio portraits of Lawrence,

dancing girls,

braziers burning incense

and all topped off with Lowell's own breathless commentary

delivered live on stage.

This show, which is a blockbuster success,

effectively creates the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

It turns Lawrence into a famous man, into a household name,

into what Lawrence himself described as "a matinee idol".

Here is the story of a war hero who goes to Arabia,

and almost single-handed raises, for the first time, a united Arab army.

He's the first mediated celebrity,

the first person to be actually filmed

and bigged up on celluloid,

one of the first was Lawrence.

But the effect on him was very ambivalent.

The story is that he would quite often go and watch the show,

but he'd sit incognito at the back.

Another letter betrays his irritation.

"I am painfully aware of what Mr Lowell Thomas is doing.

"He came out to Egypt on behalf of the American government,

"spent a fortnight in Arabia -

"I saw him twice in that time -

"and there he seems to have realised my star value on the film."

As the world's press gathers beyond the walls of his Dorset retreat,

the most famous man in England sits paralysed by self-doubt and guilt.

A legend has been born on the screen,

but a broken and hollow-eyed spectre watches on from the wings.

Who was this haunted man?

What had happened to Lawrence of Arabia?

TE Lawrence grew up in a family that was the very picture

of upper-middle class respectability.

He was the second of five sons born to Thomas and Sarah Lawrence.

But the comfortable home at number 2,

Polstead Road, North Oxford is not all it seems.

And Lawrence's chance discovery of the family's dark secret

turns his world upside down.

At the age of ten,

Lawrence overheard his father talking about his family background.

And what he heard absolutely staggered him.

His father, it turns out, has another family in Ireland,

and the name Lawrence is a total fiction.

The mother and father weren't married.

Lawrence's father, Thomas Chapman as he was, had abandoned

his first wife and daughters, left them back in Ireland.

His mother, Sarah Junner, worked as the governess

to Thomas Chapman's daughters.

And Thomas Chapman fell in love with Sarah Junner,

eloped with her.

Thomas Chapman's wife was never willing to grant a divorce,

which meant they were never able to legitimise their relationship

by getting married.

It was conditioned in the young Lawrence that this was

an unclean thing to be, that illegitimacy was a badge of shame.

They were a normal family, or masquerading as a normal family,

a regular upper-middle class family, but with this very dark secret.

Behind closed doors, it is

the Lawrence children who pay the penalty for their parents' choice.

The mother in particular, who came from a very strict religious

background, never reconciled herself to her unmarried status,

and she raised her boys almost as though they would

atone for her sins.

She was very guilty about the illegitimacy of her five boys,

and at some level I think she regarded them as artefacts of sin.

In particular Ned, as he was called in the family,

Thomas Edward Lawrence,

who was the most wilful, the most independent, the most rebellious,

and that took the form of beatings.

It wasn't a quick once across the bottom for some infraction.

They were meant to be much more serious than that.

And if not physical, I think that he

carried emotional scars for life as a result.

She left him with a bunch of paradoxes.

The key one for me that stands out

is this unhealthy connection between love and pain.

The two things were part of the same equation.

He is then torn apart by his illegitimacy,

by the social stigma associated with illegitimacy,

by all of the anxieties that that gives rise to

if you're a part of the English upper-middle class

in the period before the First World War.

The neighbours picked up there was something odd about this family.

They kept themselves to themselves in a way that others didn't.

So, he very early on got the sense of otherness.

He started to question received wisdom.

He didn't think that the established rules applied to him.

There's a sense of not fitting in, not belonging.

In his troubled isolation, Lawrence takes to his books

and finds companionship and a simple morality in Arthurian fantasy

and its tales of heroic knights.

He's looking for a world that's black and white,

where you can tell the heroes from the villains.

This is in sharp contrast to his family life,

which is full of ambiguity,

petty grubbiness,

secrets, smokescreens.

Lawrence is completely buying into that fairy tale

and perhaps is beginning to imagine himself playing some

sort of comparable role, like a latter day Arthurian hero.

Lawrence is consumed in his protective fairy tale.

As a teenager, he and his trusty steed

travel for miles around the Oxfordshire countryside

in a quest for medieval churches and the tombs of long dead knights.

He can retreat to a world which is now unchanging

cos it's in the past.

What he liked about it was that it involved knights doing deeds

of great valour, you know, on behalf of other people and so on.

And I think that was a substitute in many ways for the fact

that his parents had done the wrong thing.

For Lawrence, this chivalric code extends to setting himself tests.

From a very early age, he's got a tendency to push himself

very, very hard indeed by these great physical achievements

and great intellectual achievements.

There are stories about river rides and arduous climbs and fasting,

pushing his body well beyond its limits.

These strange tests continue when he reaches Oxford University.

I mean, one day he was found with a loaded revolver,

which he shot out of a window like a madman.

And he said, "Oh, I've just stayed awake for 52 hours

"to see what effect it would have on me."

He just subjected himself to harsh discipline to see how much

he could stand.

The seemingly ordinary scene with the burning match from David Lean's

movie is an ominous nod to one of Lawrence's characteristics.

You'll do that once too often.

It's only flesh and blood.

Lawrence did seem to have a very high threshold for pain,

and that speaks to dissociation as a child.

To be able to rise above your body

and to watch yourself as an observer until the pain is over.

What that means is that for Lawrence,

he was throughout his life numbed to pain.

He could overcome it

because he already had at the time when he was most vulnerable,

at the hands of someone that he trusted.

And again and again, we see him pushing himself

beyond his physical limitations.

I think this is reflected most obviously by the extraordinary

decisions which he takes, really, as an undergraduate

student that he's going to do his dissertation on Crusader castles.

What Lawrence chooses to do is to take himself to the Middle East,

on his own, with a camera and a notebook.

It's very dangerous.

It's very wild country.

And he walked - walked, mark you - 1,000 miles

all round Syria and what is today Jordan,

looking at these castles, drawing them,

meeting all the local villagers and this kind of thing.

Somehow Lawrence manages to send letters home.

"I have walked my boots to bits.

"My feet are all over cuts and chafes and blisters,

"and the slightest hole rubs up in this horrid climate,

"rubs up in no time into a horrible sore."

Having survived his Syrian experience,

he returns to Oxford,

where, in 1910, his research brings him a first-class degree

and the chance to return to the desert he loves.

Because Lawrence is a high achiever,

he has academic mentors at Oxford

who are very keen to shoehorn him into his first job

on a high-profile, a prestigious excavation

at Carchemish in northern Syria.

And his job there is to work as a very,

very young foreman managing the local workforce.

He develops his Arabic, an interest in the landscape,

in the culture, in the language and an affinity with the people.

It allows him to get out of the straitjacket

that, you know, Edwardian England has on him.

Nobody knows who he is.

Nobody knows his background.

It was a fantasyland.

It was a land which took him away from his parents

and the disaster of the family

and enabled him to live in a totally romantic world.

In a way, the East at the time represented some form of an escape

from, you know, kind of Western European morality,

ideologies in general.

The East was seen as a space of liberation,

especially for social kind of misfits,

people who didn't feel at home in Europe.

It is in Carchemish that Lawrence meets a 14-year-old Arab boy,

Dahoum,

a character who goes on to occupy a central place in his imagination

for the rest of his life.

"Dahoum is an interesting character

"and has more intelligence than the rank and file.

"He talks of going to Aleppo to school with the money he has

"made from us, and I will try to keep an eye on him

"and see what happens."

Dahoum becomes a close friend of Lawrence's.

I don't think there is any real doubt

that there is a homoerotic relationship.

There are pictures of the two of them wearing each other's clothes.

Lawrence is rarely photographed smiling,

but in the ones taken with Dahoum, we see a different man.

Friends certainly,

but lovers?

He found the physical side of life with other people

very, very difficult.

In fact, he even wouldn't shake hands with people sometimes,

so the idea of him having a relationship with a man or

a woman involving the physical, let alone coitus,

was virtually, you know, laughable.

I don't think it was ever consummated.

I think Lawrence's, uh, homosexuality

was throughout his life sternly repressed.

There's a lovely quote, which I think is quite telling,

where he says "to put my hand on a living thing is defilement".

So, for me, he's a sexual puritan.

But Dahoum is much more than a friend or lover.

For Lawrence, he embodies the imagined purity of the Arab culture

that bewitched him.

"The perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanised Arab

"is appalling.

"Better 1,000 times the Arab untouched.

"The foreigners come out here to teach,

"whereas they had much better learn.

"For in everything but wits and knowledge,

"the Arab is the better of the two."

Dahoum becomes a kind of idealised young Arab,

who is in some sense pristine and uncontaminated

and not spoiled and made corrupt by contact with modernity.

Which he regarded as something that was quite horrible,

and he used the word, I think, "monstrous".

He did not like modernity one bit.

And he's always envisaged himself as somebody who didn't

belong to this modern era.

He was a romantic, classical hero who happened to have been

born just in the wrong age.

If we think of Lawrence as a would-be Arthurian knight,

he has got to find somebody in need of help, in need of rescue,

in need of a hero to lead them.

In Lawrence's mind, the desert Arabs, the Bedouin, that he

comes to know in Carchemish take on that role.

These are people to be helped, these are people to be lifted

out of their benightedness and their poverty and their downtroddenness,

in the case of the Arabs, under the heal of the Ottoman empire.

So there's this connection back to King Arthur and the Knights

of the Round Table and the Crusades and the whole kit and caboodle.

When he meets the Bedouin, it's like Camelot with camels.

He's very comfortable there.

He's having his adventure.

Laurence's mind is full of these sort of heroic images.

This is a kind of real life quest.

Lawrence's eccentric way of looking at the world is set.

But the First World War will test his worldview to breaking point.

So, in many ways, he was set up for a hero's journey.

It's predestined.

The conflict that is to have such an effect on Lawrence

begins in July, 1914.

The First World War is fought on several fronts

and involves a complex series of alliances.

For the British, the enemy in the First World War

is primarily Germany.

But this is a war of alliances.

Britain goes to war primarily to support its ally, France.

And of course, Germany has its own allies.

And in October, November, 1914,

the Ottoman Empire enters the First World War on the side of Germany.

With its power base in Constantinople,

the modern Istanbul in Turkey, the Ottoman Empire has

for four centuries been the dominant force in the Middle East.

It is the fight against the Ottoman Turks

that is destined to be Lawrence's war.

Lawrence volunteers for service when the war breaks out

and because of his particular background he is shipped out

to Cairo and taken into British military intelligence.

He becomes part of the Arab Bureau, which is a little kind of think

tank and research unit attached to British military intelligence.

Lawrence is put into the Arab Bureau to start by gathering

intelligence on the Middle East, all parts of the Ottoman Empire

and north Africa.

He's stuck in an office drawing maps, doing cartography.

Lawrence's frustration is illustrated in an atmospheric

and memorable scene from the epic movie.

Michael George Hartley, this is a nasty, dark little room.

That's right.

We are not happy in it.

I am!

Peter O'Toole's depiction here of an impatient

and insubordinate Lawrence was close to the truth.

He is reluctant to salute.

He is reluctant to wear full uniform.

He is often insolent towards superior officers.

He loved sticking pins into important people to see if

he could deflate them and of course they got rather annoyed at all this.

Lawrence is said to be resentful and irritatingly subversive.

In his own mind, an overlooked and under-utilized warrior knight.

"We have no adventures save those with a pen.

"One would be so much happier in a trench where one did not have

"to worry about politics and information all day."

"I'm going to be in Cairo till the day I die."

The war is raging all around him.

He hasn't seen any action.

Two of his brothers are killed on the Western Front before

he has even heard a gun fired in anger.

Brothers that he was close to, all the Lawrence boys were close

to each other, it must have been devastating.

It is a succession of allied military disasters

against the Ottoman army that gives Lawrence the chance

to avenge his brothers.

1915, the British and their Anzac allies

mount a naval landing at Gallipoli.

Very, very quickly, the British

and their allies realise that they are facing a formidable foe.

They are landing at the bottom of quite stark cliff faces,

and the Ottoman troops are literally firing down onto them as they land.

It's a blood bath.

It's not hard to see why there was no appetite for another

conventional attack against the Ottomans.

And increasingly, British strategists realise that they

need to fight the war differently in this part of the world.

The map of the Middle East looked very

different at the outbreak of World War I.

Several countries familiar to us now didn't even exist.

Much of the region fell within the Ottoman Empire.

The British want to defeat the Ottomans without committing troops.

Growing resistance from the Bedouin Arabs gives them this chance.

It also gives Lawrence a way to escape his desk job.

The key figure is Sharif Hussein,

guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

He is of a dynastic family.

He's an ambitious man.

He wants to see his family succeed.

And what he has to offer is resources and willing fighters,

who follow him and his sons.

In return, what does Sharif Hussein want?

Well, he essentially wants the promise of an independent

Arab state at the end of the war.

And the British say, "Fine, you can have it."

And Sharif Hussein says, "Well, what are we agreeing on, exactly?

"Where are we going to draw the borders?

"Where's the line for my Arabian kingdom?"

And the British respond by saying,

"Look, we haven't got time to discuss this now.

"Let's settle the details after the war."

Essentially he comes away with a very clear sense of a promise

being made in return for an Arab uprising against their Ottoman

Imperial masters, that Britain will support the establishment of an

Arab independent state, with Hussein and his dynastic family at the head.

The Arab Revolt gets under way in June 1916.

But it stutters in its early stages when faced with a well-supplied,

well-organized Ottoman army with superior firepower.

Lawrence, due to his familiarity with the people,

is sent by British commanders

to work out how they might piggy-back the Arab Revolt.

In October 1916, Lawrence meets for the first time

the Arab leaders to work out what the British need to do

to bring support to the Arab Revolt.

For Lawrence, the Arab Revolt taps directly into his psyche.

Finally, here is a real-life Arthurian Quest.

He saw himself as somebody defending the poor, the downtrodden and

of course they were people fighting on horseback and camelback so

that was going back to that romantic idea of fighting more like knights.

Lawrence reports back that the Revolt needs guns,

money and support.

It also requires an Arab leader worth the British investing in.

Lawrence is seen here meeting the man he believes is the key to that.

Hussein's son, Faisal.

He is very impressed by Faisal's gravitas, the way he comes across

with a great kind of Arab dignity.

He looks like a real Arab prince.

"I felt at first glance

"that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek.

"The leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory.

"Faisal looked very tall and pillar-like,

"very slender in his long, white silk robes.

"His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger."

Lawrence immediately says, "This is the one,

"this is the man who can lead the revolt."

So he reports back to his British superiors

that Faisal is the commander that the British really ought

to invest their resources in.

And I think at this very early stage there is a kind of rapport

developing between these two men.

So much so that Faisal now requests of the British authorities

that they should attach Lawrence to his staff permanently

as a liaison officer.

Lawrence's relationship with Faisal is key.

It is also complicated.

This iconic moment from David Lean's film

is loaded with symbolism and meaning.

The white robe is Faisal's wedding garment.

Prince Faisal offered them to Lawrence and Lawrence decided,

"Well, yes, I would love to wear them."

The fact that he knew he was wearing Faisal's wedding dress

and that also plays into his homoerotic fantasies.

It's very clear that he liked him,

that he regarded him as a very handsome man.

In a way it's two in one, you know.

So this is this handsome prince

that he really liked, but also he is the actual leader of the Arab

Revolt and "I'm wearing his wedding dress and I'm fighting with him!"

So, that's...

Going into the desert was an opportunity for him

to live the fantasy.

He was a stranger in a faraway land

and he immersed himself completely.

And in fact, this relationship becomes absolutely crucial to

both men as the Arab Revolt unfolds.

Both men know that Ottoman-held Damascus is the target.

The historic capital of the Arabs has a huge emotional pull.

Lawrence is pushing their buttons

when he mentions Damascus in their first meeting at Wadi Safr.

"And how do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?", asked Faisal.

"Well," I replied.

"But it is far from Damascus."

"The word had fallen like a sword in their midst.

"There was a quiver."

"Everybody present stiffened where he sat

"and held his breath for a silent minute."

"Faisal lifted his eyes, smiling at me and said, 'Praise be to God.'"

Realising the dream of Damascus is going to require imagination,

the Ottoman-held port of Aqaba falls into Lawrence's sights.

Aqaba is hugely important in the war

because it's the northern-most port on the Red Sea,

so that a force which is based at Aqaba

is actually within striking distance of Damascus.

Lawrence has been in the Middle East for three years.

Long enough to know he can't trust his British masters to deliver

on their promise of an independent Arab kingdom.

He realises the British would reject a decision to take Aqaba

since it would give the Arabs more influence in redrawing the map

of the post-war Middle East.

So, for a torn Lawrence, his next move is obvious.

He must flee with the Arabs and go missing.

They don't know where he is.

He is at complete liberty to do what the hell he pleases.

This suits him terribly well.

It suits Faisal so long as Lawrence is doing what Faisal wants.

He goes completely off message,

he doesn't tell anybody where he is going.

He doesn't consult with anybody because he fears that

if he did do that, he would receive a direct order not to go.

Lawrence and the Arab army leave from the Red Sea town of Wejh.

It is an event fictionalised

in this vivid and spectacular scene from the classic biopic.

The imaginary character of Sharif Ali,

played by Omar Sharif, assesses the route ahead.

And that is the desert.

From here until the other side, no water but what we carry.

For the camels, no water at all.

If the camels die...

..we die.

And in 20 days they will start to die.

There's no time to waste, then, is there?

They have to cross al-Houl,

which is one of the most savage pieces of desert

anywhere on the planet.

A great, waterless expanse.

The idea of moving any number of troops across a desert

like that would be seen as,

if not a suicide mission then a fool's errand at the very least.

It was 600 miles on a camel and really extraordinary.

Even Lawrence says things like "I'm sick this morning,

can't take much more of this."

Which shows how hard it was and he was hardened, pretty hardened.

He used to walk around the desert with nothing on his feet

just to see if he could harden his feet.

Finally, after a gruelling eight weeks in the desert,

their target is in sight -

the Turkish base at Aqaba.

The charge is an epic scene in Lawrence of Arabia,

one based upon Lawrence's own description.

"A charge of ridden camels going nearly 30 miles an hour

"was irresistible.

"The Turks fired a few shots, but most only shrieked

"and turned to run."

SHOUTING

In this sumptuous sequence,

Peter O'Toole looks full of confidence.

In fact, he was petrified.

Any confidence was the result of the brandy and milk

he'd drunk prior to shooting.

In a furious flurry of close-quarters killing,

the Ottoman battalion is destroyed

before they finally arrive at Aqaba and the sea.

The actual moment of arrival in the city

is captured in this photograph, taken on 6 July, 1917.

So, Lawrence and Faisal together understand

that taking Aqaba not only gives them a base,

but it's also a great psychological victory.

TE Lawrence has made an incredible journey.

The boy who had once concealed himself

within a Romantic, Arthurian fantasy is now living it for real,

but he knows that his dream of an Arab kingdom is in grave danger.

The consequences of that dream will threaten to destroy him.

July 1917 - the third year of the First World War.

TE Lawrence and Prince Faisal have led their Arab army into Aqaba.

British forces under General Allenby

are gaining ground on the Ottoman forces in the west.

All are heading north, towards Damascus,

the heart of the Ottoman war effort.

The capture of Aqaba is a crucial turning point for the Arabs

because a force which is based at Aqaba

is actually within striking distance of Damascus.

They've seized the initiative.

The Arabs are very much in the driving seat of what happens next.

Lawrence, seen here with his personal bodyguard,

also realises that the quest for Arab sovereignty

leads to the dusty streets of Damascus.

His Bedouin comrades have come to trust his judgment.

His very un-British modesty and respect

are clear at meetings with tribal leaders.

Lawrence never said anything.

He would just sit there and listen to all the other views

being put forward by all the Bedouin chiefs.

When they had all finished talking, Lawrence would then quietly say,

"Well, look, what about this?"

But if he had said to start with,

"Now, I don't want your opinions. We've worked it out.

"What we are going to do is this," they would all have said

the equivalent in Arabic of "Bugger off"...

LAUGHS: ..is what they would have said and wouldn't have done it.

It's not easy to deceive people like this.

They are simple, on the level of the education they may have,

but they're extremely sophisticated in their capacity

to identify genuine people.

If it wasn't authentic, they would have seen it.

But they didn't see it.

Lawrence is harbouring a secret,

knowledge of a confidential British and French understanding

that breaks their promise of a kingdom for the Arabs.

Lawrence knows that he is leading military operations,

he's leading men into battle,

he's sometimes leading men to their deaths, on the basis of a lie.

"We are asking them to fight on a lie and I cannot stand it."

The so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement had been drawn up in 1916

without Arab knowledge.

It anticipated dividing up the land already promised to them

between the British and the French in any post-war settlement.

When he knew the truth about Sykes-Picot, he couldn't speak it.

And that was incredibly painful for him.

Lawrence begins to be torn apart by this contradiction

between a kind of embryonic Arab nationalism,

which he identifies with, and the machinations of the Imperial powers,

which he is all too well aware of.

So, he found himself trying to mediate

the wants and the needs and the desires

for all of these conflicting parties, but at the same time,

he was also using all of these different parties

in order to enact his own fantasy -

to be that knight, to be part of this chivalric-like fantasy.

Lawrence has tipped Faisal off about Sykes-Picot.

They know that if the quest for an independent Arab kingdom

is to have any chance of success,

Lawrence will have to keep his mouth shut

and exert his influence from the wings.

Lawrence is very careful, so as not to impose an understanding.

I think he allowed an understanding to unfold.

He gambled on what he was best at - leaving an impression.

He wanted to be trusted -

"I'm not so sure about those who I represent,

"but you can definitely trust me."

And that worked.

Regardless of the betrayal, the taking of Aqaba

has put Lawrence and the Arabs front and central

in the fight against the Ottoman Turks.

It is up to them to push against the enemy in the east.

Lawrence goes straight for their jugular - the Hejaz railway.

The Hejaz railway runs from Damascus to Medina.

It was 800 miles long.

This is the crucial supply line that is enabling the Ottoman Turks

to maintain a toehold in the Hejaz region.

What it actually allows is the Ottomans to move troops up and down

and to be in a position where they can control any uprising

among the tribesmen.

Lawrence knows that he and his men would always lose

a conventional battle against the well-armed Ottomans...

..so he needs to play to his strength.

And the railway presents a perfect target.

It is highly vulnerable to sudden, surprise attacks

by mounted guerrillas, emerging out of the vastness of the desert,

striking suddenly, unexpectedly,

and then disappearing back into the desert.

It's a war of hit and run.

Lawrence doesn't create guerrilla warfare.

What Lawrence does, very quickly, is adapts guerrilla warfare

to the circumstances on the ground and with the men in front of him.

EXPLOSION, HORSE WHINNIES

The attack on the railway was a gripping and stunning scene

in David Lean's classic.

GUNFIRE

HORSES WHINNY

This incredibly complex sequence was shot on two miles of specially laid track on location in Spain.

You don't go and face people frontally.

So what Lawrence thought they should do was to smash the railway with dynamite.

But just enough to keep it still going

so that the Turks would repair it,

and then you could smash it again to cause them one hell of a nuisance.

So successful is Lawrence that as many as 20,000 Turks are diverted

to try and stop him.

But there is little honour in this type of guerrilla warfare,

striking unexpectedly and indiscriminately,

bringing death and destruction to combatants and non-combatants alike.

So, the Arabs would go in then to clean up

and by clean up, of course, I mean kill the people that were left

alive, to steal possessions from them.

Running somebody through with a sword can't be considered

a clean war. I mean, there were massacres took place,

whether by the bullet or the sword.

"The killing and killing of Turks is horrible.

"When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place

"in bits, and still alive, many of them, and know that you have done

"hundreds in the same way before and must do hundreds more if you can."

It's not like the romantic image of war that you

see in a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

It's a horrible, dirty business.

Lawrence's chivalric fantasy, the noble, clean war

fought in the name of an oppressed people,

is beginning to fade in the harsh desert light.

Real life is different.

Real war is hell.

As Lawrence and his army harry the Turks in the east,

British forces move west from Cairo.

Damascus beckons.

The Australians, the New Zealanders

and the British were edging the Turks steadily backwards.

They take Gaza and then Jerusalem.

The Ottoman Empire, seemingly invulnerable for 400 years, is falling apart.

Everywhere the allied guns were speeding the Turkish army's retreat towards Constantinople.

Damascus, the ancient Arab city, is there for the taking.

Feisal and Lawrence have been discussing this for some time

and they say, "You've got to set up a government in Damascus."

Getting to Damascus first seems like the only way to outflank

the territorial stitch-up proposed by the British and the French.

He was hoping, possession being nine tenths of the law,

that if he could get the Arabs into Damascus before anybody else,

they could lay claim to it. And maybe that could turn the tide.

Forced by events to choose between the British and his Arab friends,

he chooses the Arabs.

On 1 October, 1918, Damascus falls to British desert mounted cavalry.

Lawrence and Feisal are too late.

They are seen here going to meet British General Edmund Allenby at the Victoria Hotel.

As Lawrence and Feisal had feared,

the British renege on the deal with the Arabs.

The British ultimately decide that they would rather

honour their promises to the French about having Damascus,

about having Syria, than give in to the wishes of a few Arabs.

Feisal leaves the Victoria Hotel.

Feisal has imposed upon him French advisers,

a situation which Feisal is very unhappy with.

Lawrence too is angry.

He feels Feisal and the Arabs have been betrayed.

But deep down, he feels he is to blame.

This is when that sense of guilt, that feeling that starts

eating him from within, so to speak, starts taking over.

Lawrence's distress can be seen in this photograph

taken at the Victoria hotel just 30 minutes after

he resigns his position in the British Army.

Camelot with camels has crumbled before his eyes.

He is full of regret and remorse.

"I presumed, seeing no other leader with the will

"and the power, that I would survive the campaign

"and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield

"but my own country and its allies in the council chamber.

"It's not yet clear if I succeeded, but it is clear that I had no

"shadow of leave to engage the Arabs, unknowing in such a hazard."

Added to this, his dear friend Dahoum is gone.

The beautiful boy, entwined forever in his mind with the innocent

happiness of Carchemish, had died there of typhoid just weeks before.

When Dahoum dies, Lawrence is grief-stricken.

There's an innocence and purity to Dahoum.

He is the embodiment of an ancient Eastern people.

"I liked a particular Arab very much and thought freedom for the race would be an acceptablepresent."

So could this really all have been for Dahoum?

His death also represents the death of those narratives which he

was able to hold for a relatively long time.

He nearly almost got there, but he died.

But then also his death meant also the death of the Arab dream.

In a kind of despair, and I think he's very low indeed, I think he's

deeply depressed at this moment.

He seeks from Allenby release from service,

and Allenby grants his request and he heads home.

"The old war is closing

"and my use is gone.

"I wonder how the Powers will let the Arabs get on."

For him this was an innocent quest and the fact that it was muddied

along the way by politics and vested interests left him completely

demoralised and disillusioned about the part that he had played in it.

The dream turned to dust.

The Great War is over.

Germany and her allies are crushed.

An exhausted and disillusioned TE Lawrence is back in London.

His Arab friends are about to be sidelined by the western

powers in a carve-up of the Middle East.

Then out of the blue, Lawrence gets a summons from Buckingham Palace.

He goes at once.

He walks in and he's offered a knighthood.

I mean, the highest, you know, civilian honour

that can be accorded in Britain.

And he refuses it, I mean, the story goes, on the spot, point blank.

The King apparently was left standing, shocked.

People don't generally say no to kings and the reason

he gave for refusing it was because of the betrayal of the Arabs.

Lawrence said the empire

and the French were not giving the Arabs their due

and were dishonouring the country and he wouldn't be part of it.

He does not want to profit from it, to benefit from it in any way.

It would violate his deep sense of conscience

of what is right were he to have done so.

The Imperial powers meet in Paris in 1919 to decide how to punish

Germany and her allies, and how to divide the spoils.

From the sidelines, Lawrence has to fight even to secure an Arab presence.

He wrote lots of articles to the English newspapers,

The Times and that sort of thing, saying we had let them down

and we were going to let them down, this was very bad.

And he persuades the British that there should be Arab

representation, and it takes British negotiation to persuade

the French that Arab representative needs to be at the Paris peace conference.

So, that person is Feisal.

Lawrence acts as Feisal's translator.

But he is much more than that.

He's ostensibly attached to the British delegation,

but in reality he's working very closely with his friend

and comrade in arms, Feisal, and of course what

he's trying to do is to get the best possible deal that he can.

There is certainly concern among some in the British camp,

and the French camp, even more in the French camp, that they

don't quite know whose side Lawrence is on.

Lawrence and Feisal protest about the deal the Arabs thought they had.

But few are listening in the mirrored halls of Versailles.

He was trying his best to salvage what clearly had shattered.

He thought he could embarrass his own country into delivering

what it didn't deliver.

The Paris peace conference winds up with the future of the Middle East undecided.

There is to be another meeting of leaders in Cairo.

But before that happens comes the event that is to change Lawrence's

life forever, the release of Lowell Thomas's Arabian fantasy.

The American journalist who had filmed him for a few days in the Middle East a year before

has fashioned from his material a sensational show.

Lawrence barely recognises the version of himself he sees.

Politically this is good for Lawrence.

It definitely gives him a degree of publicity for the Arab cause

that would have been impossible without Lowell Thomas.

But on a personal level, fame is the very last thing Lawrence

needs right now.

The man who stares out from Thomas's publicity photos

can have no idea what's coming.

He finds out soon enough.

"Lowell Thomas has been lecturing in America and London

"and has written a series of six articles about me.

"They are as rank as possible and are making life very difficult for me."

The trauma of the war, the sense of guilt, the fact that he's

still involved in post-war diplomacy, so he's got all of the stress of

trying to achieve something for the Arabs, his former comrades in arms,

and at the same time he's being turned into a heroic figure and a

celebrity, he's an early example of 20th-century celebrity culture.

It's a huge load, I think, for him

to be carrying at this moment in his life.

"I have neither the money nor the wish to

"maintain my constant character as the mountebank he makes me.

"He has a lot of correct information

"and fills it out with stories picked up from officers and by imagination."

Suddenly being heroic after fighting the desert campaign on a lie with

Sykes-Picot in the background made it also feel a fraud as well.

So therefore he didn't deserve this fame, he didn't deserve the, what he called,

notoriety for what he'd done, so I think fame was very painful to him.

The Cairo conference takes place in March 1921.

There's a fabulous photograph of Churchill looking very

out of place on a camel and Lawrence there looking much more at home,

posing for the obligatory photograph in front of the pyramids.

Lawrence is there at the Cairo conference as an adviser to

Churchill, who at the time was the Colonial Secretary.

Churchill to a certain extent gets it.

And I think he didn't like what he saw.

He didn't like the idea that the British were

seen as the people who betrayed a dream.

But Lawrence knows Churchill's sense of honour will only get the Arabs so far.

The Sykes-Picot agreement returns to dash his hopes for Feisal

and the Arabs.

It's the point at which Lawrence accepts that the French,

to the British, are more important than the Arabs.

And it's at that meeting that Sykes-Picot takes on greater significance.

The British and the French negotiate the portioning out of

Arab territories.

Nevertheless, for the British some sense of obligation persists.

There is this sense of debt to be owed to Feisal by the British.

And if they can't give him what he wants,

then perhaps they can give him something else.

Feisal is given the crown of Iraq,

a country they have literally just drawn on the map.

He's duly sent to Baghdad.

It's the first time he has set foot in the country, it's his coronation.

So there's Feisal,

he didn't get Arabia as he was promised,

crowned Feisal I of Iraq, thanks to the British.

I guess the British see it as a halfway house,

that they are in some way honouring their promise to

Hussein whilst also honouring that promise to the French.

But really it's very much a facade of British Imperial

control through different means.

The map of the Middle East that emerges suits nobody

but the French and the British.

What you end up with is these boundaries, often cutting across

through tribes, through ethnicities, they don't really make any sense.

Arab expectations are really absolutely dashed by

the final settlement.

There is a great sense of disappointment and betrayal.

The people who had welcomed Lawrence and Feisal into Damascus now

see the settlement as a betrayal by Lawrence himself.

The overwhelming approach would be, to Lawrence, that he was part of

a conspiracy against them, that he was an agent of an imperialist power.

Lawrence withdraws. His head tries to tell him this is a compromised peace with honour.

"I assured them during the campaigns that our promises

"held their face value and backed them with my word.

"My relief at getting out of the affair with clean hands is very great."

But in his heart he knows it is a rank betrayal.

After he came back to England,

his mother talks about him sitting between the hours of breakfast

and lunch and dinner, just staring into the void.

It's the reality that life isn't as straightforward as he wanted

it to be when he was a boy, cycling around,

dreaming of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

The empire that he is working for is a treacherous empire.

There are all of these modern contradictions tearing apart

the vision which Lawrence has.

He realised that his fantasy of being this righteous

foreigner who goes to the aid of a downtrodden people,

that that was fatally flawed,

that along the way there would be so many compromises and trade-offs,

so much deception that he would become a liar in his own eyes.

There is a real weariness, a physical weariness

and a mental weariness which has torn him apart psychologically

and brought him to the point of mental breakdown,

psychological collapse, so that at this time he's very close,

he admits this himself, he's very close to suicide.

By the early 1920s, TE Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia,

is a reluctant international celebrity.

His role in the Arab Revolt plays publicly as key in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire,

and the end of the Great War.

Lauded by monarchs and prime ministers,

Lawrence could have had anything he wanted from the masters of the British Empire.

Instead he disappears, alone, to the wilds of Dorset.

It's a small worker's cottage with no electricity and no running water.

Surrounded by woodland.

It's a place where he could be alone.

It was one place he could,

if you like, delude himself was home for him.

It's an ugly little cottage, really.

I think after his years in the desert, he enjoyed the simplicity.

There's something quite monkish about Lawrence.

Alone with his troubled mind, Lawrence finds solace in writing.

A revealing personal account of the Arab Revolt, called Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

It is a book that has been taking shape for some time.

It's an extraordinary biography, because it is an act of catharsis.

There's no doubt at all that when one reads it, one is reading

the outpourings of a deeply troubled man, a man who is riddled

with guilt, who is carrying a huge burden of mental anguish coming

out of the war and is trying to deal with that, in part, by sharing it,

by laying bare his soul, by talking it through in the form of the book.

"The book was the record of me in the Arab movement and before the end

"I was very weary and moved in a haze, hardly knowing what I did.

"So far as it could be, it reproduced the sight of my eyes

"and the evidence of my senses and feelings.

"If people read it as history, they mistake it.

"Day by day, as the years pass,

"I hate myself more and more for the part I played in it."

Lawrence had believed the cause of Arab self-determination to be

the real-life chivalric quest he had always dreamed of.

The reality of war

and its aftermath has proved a terrible disappointment.

His realisation that his fantasy was flawed,

that was the beginning of his unravelling.

He had gone in thinking that this was going to be, you know,

Camelot with camels and he came out of it having had a wake-up call,

that in the world of men, there's never just pure intention.

You know, there is, everything is muddied, everything gets grubby.

The dream of Arab nationhood perished in the cynical

Imperial deal-making of Versailles and Cairo.

Lawrence blames himself.

The Arabs had believed in him, and he had let them down.

Men were dying for a lie

Which wouldn't have troubled many of the military

establishment around the First World War, but it troubled him.

On top of this, he has learned the hard way of the cruel

and bloody cynicism of war.

Lawrence is basically a conscientious man,

a decent man, actually.

And I think he is traumatised by it.

He saw and did things and perhaps suffered things during the war

that certainly came back to haunt him.

He had what would almost certainly be called PTSD now.

There wasn't the psychological understanding that would have

helped him through the trauma.

PTSD feels deeply distressing because you can smell, you can

taste, you can feel, you can hear, you can see

everything as though it was happening to you all over again.

This is the moment when he's most in the spotlight,

is really when he wants to retreat to a darkened room.

To cope with his inner turmoil,

Lawrence withdraws from public life to seek peace in the solitude

and anonymity that he remembers from childhood.

"I was not very respectably born and had to make my own way.

"The war elevated me too high and I have reverted."

He was really very depressed, one way and another.

He didn't want to have any more command.

He wanted just to be told what to do and have a daily job where

he could just get on with it, not in the limelight.

To that end, in 1922, Lawrence makes the extraordinary decision to

join the RAF, as an ordinary airman and under a false name, Ross.

And then, when the press find him, he joins the Tank Corps,

under the name Shaw.

He had started life with a fake name.

This was just another reinvention.

I think we have to remember that Lawrence was essentially

someone split. There are so many different sides of him.

He reinvented himself many times over. I think

he learned very early on that this was a label.

It was something you could take on and off,

like changing into a new pair of shoes.

"I was an Irish nobody. I tried something,

"it was a failure, and I became an Irish nobody again."

But there is nowhere for TE Lawrence,

Lawrence of Arabia, to hide.

He just can't get away from it. I mean,

changing your name by deed poll is no small step.

You know, he wasn't trying to draw attention to himself

but it kept finding him out.

His great friend George Bernard Shaw grew impatient with

Lawrence's attempts to get away from his own legend.

"Like all heroes and, I must add, all idiots,

"you greatly exaggerate your power of moulding the universe

"around your personal convictions.

"You created Lawrence and now you must put up with him

"as best you can."

Was he naive?

I don't think naive would be the word I'd use.

More...the fame was unexpected

and he didn't understand the pursuit of journalists.

But Lawrence did have secrets - secrets he feared would one day

emerge in public.

While he was in the Tank Corps, Lawrence paid

a young Scottish soldier named John Bruce to beat him.

These beatings were, at Lawrence's request, frequent and brutal.

They were a subject that caused Lawrence much shame.

He did feel, as a result of this, that he

couldn't go back into public life, that this was a liability.

That's not a normal way of operating.

That's not a normal way of exorcising one's demons.

He has masochistic tendencies, at the very least.

Was it punishment because he failed the Arabs?

Was it a punishment because he couldn't save Dahoum?

We can even take it back to his childhood

when he received beatings from his mother.

Love and pain and punishment had become connected in quite

an unhealthy way, and I think that was a pattern

he then repeated many times over in the rest of his life.

The beatings administered by John Bruce are part of this pattern.

A disturbing scene in David Lean's film shows

Peter O'Toole's Lawrence captured by the Turks and tortured...

..with undeniable menace and sexual overtones.

COUGHING

To me!

The scene is based on events described more graphically

in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

"I was being dragged about by two men, each disputing over a

"leg as if to split me apart, while a third man rode me astride.

"I remembered smiling idly at him,

"for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me.

"He hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin.

"This doubled me half-over, screaming, or rather

"trying impotently to scream,

"only shuddering through my mouth."

He was describing abuse that was physically

and sexually painful, but that he may have enjoyed.

And I think there is a passage in the book that

suggests there was sexual release from it.

"For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes

"respite from a pain which drove me mad,

"I gave away the only possession we are born with,

"our bodily integrity."

He was left shattered by his experiences in Deraa.

He replayed those memories, berating himself for having surrendered

and given in because he couldn't take the pain.

The need to receive pain,

to exorcise demons that he couldn't get out.

That makes him a victim,

if that's the story, and more to be pitied than anything else.

The impression of simplicity given by Lawrence's pared back life

belies the seething complexity of his inner world.

He is neither the man he seems nor the man he wishes to be.

But there is another compulsion that can be relied upon

to bind his wounds and temporarily lift his spirit -

the thrill of danger.

"When my mood gets too hot

"and I find myself wandering beyond control, I pull out my motorbike and

"hurl it at top speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour.

"My nerves are jaded and gone near dead so that nothing less

"than hours of voluntary danger will prick them into life."

But the speed that liberates Lawrence on the open road will also

prove to be his undoing.

The epic movie Lawrence of Arabia begins

with this almost pastoral scene of the man on his motorbike.

The director and Peter O'Toole were trying to bring

an enigma into focus, a man who understands

the mechanics of a sonnet and finds poetry in an engine.

That is what was so extraordinary about him.

He could be interested in sort of airy-fairy, head in the air stuff.

And then at the same time he could, he could take a motorbike to

pieces and put it together again and do all that sort of thing.

He was a man for all seasons in that respect.

The two halves of the man meet in the Brough motorbike

he names Boanerges, Sons of Thunder -

the nickname Jesus gave to his unruly disciples, James and John.

For Lawrence, it is poetry in motion.

I think it was another form of escape, as it is for lots

of people, speed.

And he said that driving fast down country lanes was his safety valve.

He said he could forget himself,

that he'd be lost when he was going at speed.

I mean, the Brough motorcycle could do in excess of 100mph.

Think about that - in the early 1930s, that's an astonishing speed.

On May the 13th, 1935, Lawrence is home at Clouds Hill.

He is finishing a letter.

He was an inveterate letter writer. I mean,

hundreds of letters written by Lawrence to friends.

It will turn out to be the very last letter he writes.

He rides Boanerges to the Post Office

and is on his way home.

The road undulates with several blind dips.

Just over the top of the second dip, he saw these two boy cyclists.

Some reports say they were weaving around the road,

as boys would want to do on a country lane.

BRAKES SQUEAL

He swerves to avoid them.

Lawrence is shot over the handlebars and thrown against a tree.

He never regains consciousness.

His injuries are terrible.

Lawrence of Arabia dies in hospital six days later.

On May the 21st, 1935,

Lawrence's funeral takes place at this church in Moreton,

just three miles from Clouds Hill.

It was a little church, a little village church.

Moreton's hardly a hamlet, even.

Winston Churchill is among the famous names to make

the journey from London.

Churchill was in tears.

So, rightly or wrongly, they all thought, you know,

an irreplaceable, wonderful man has died.

There's no doubt about that.

The congregation sings John Wesley's "Jesu, Lover of My Soul".

It is Lawrence's favourite hymn.

"Plenteous grace with thee is found.

"Grace to cover all my sin.

"Let the healing streams abound.

"Make and keep me pure within."

At the end of it all, it's a very simple burial in a simple

churchyard, which I think befits something at the heart of Lawrence.

This sense of asceticism, the sense of simplicity,

this wanting a simple life, which fame rather undermined.

Lawrence's headstone is at once modest and grand.

It is the biggest in the churchyard, but says almost nothing,

its ambivalence somehow appropriate for the one who lies beneath.

The British public reading the sorrowful headlines are

in little doubt about the official status of this son of the Empire.

But Lawrence saw himself as a failure.

Lawrence of Arabia was a created character, and he knew that,

so he struggled to identify with the successes, and he internalised

all the disappointments and negative aspects of it.

"In the eyes of 'those who know',

"I failed badly in attempting a piece of work which a little more

"resolution would have pushed through, or left untouched."

This is something that's very common in celebrity culture.

These public personas are created,

and if you don't feel connected authentically to that public

persona, the distance grows psychologically to the point

where you don't feel you can take credit for the successes.

You feel like a fraud.

85 years have passed since Lawrence met his end

in the trees at the edge of a country road.

Lawrence's appeal endures.

He is just about the only British

soldier from the First World War who remains a household name.

I think he's lived in the British psyche for so long

because he represents in a funny sort of way,

something that Englishmen have a sneaking admiration for.

You're very brilliant, you have some aristocracy somewhere

in your family, you're incredibly brave, you're as hard as nails.

The myth and legend of Lawrence is partly due to his own words.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom represents an attempt to cleanse himself,

to put distance between himself and his experiences.

It has never been out of print.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an extraordinary book,

a very controversial book.

It turns out to be a very reliable war memoir,

a very accurate war memoir, if overlong and overwrought.

It's an astonishing book.

There are fantastically wonderful passages in it, but it's

a bit shapeless in some ways, it wanders all over the place.

However remarkable, Seven Pillars of Wisdom could not predict

the future, and the consequences of the post-war Middle East map

making of which Lawrence was a part.

Inevitably, his involvement in that process has damaged his reputation.

For the Lawrences and the Churchills after the First World War,

they are very much responsible for creating the map.

A century of conflict, repression and strife followed.

I think there's no real doubt, that the outcome,

this carving up of the region into geopolitical fragments has

proved to be a disaster for the peace of the region

and the wellbeing of the people of the region.

I wouldn't say they're responsible, necessarily, though,

for the problems of the Middle East today.

I think every generation of British and later American policy has

a degree of responsibility for the problems in the Middle East.

But Lawrence had been a reluctant signatory to the post-war

carve up, in which new nations had been conjured from little

but Imperial whim.

His plan had been different.

I think Lawrence had a cleaner vision of a post-war Middle East,

in that he did envisage a united independent Arab state.

I think he was unrealistic about how that might be brought about.

His politics prevented him from understanding the true nature

of the revolutionary transformation that was really needed.

But nobody in the British establishment understood

the scale of revolutionary ambition among the people of the Middle East.

There's something much greater.

There's an intellectual depth to this.

And the British don't fully understand this.

They don't get what they're really working with here,

and they don't get the ramifications of letting it down.

This is so much bigger than this.

As a statesman, Lawrence was most likely out of his depth.

But as a military strategist, he was arguably ahead of his time.

We should put all our cards on the table and say,

Lawrence didn't win the war. OK?

There wasn't a bloody great Arab revolt.

It didn't achieve very much.

Allenby would have got there anyway.

He might be brilliant,

but he is a young man with limited responsibilities.

He is not making policy.

However, he would probably be recognised today

as a significant practitioner and theoretician of guerrilla warfare.

He did introduce an entirely new concept in irregular warfare,

which has been adopted subsequently by the SAS and a lot of people.

If we think about the Cuban Revolution or the Vietnamese

Revolution or the Algerian War of Liberation, I think Lawrence

is a genuine innovator in developing ideas about and practising

methods of guerrilla warfare that have stood the test of time.

However, increasingly some historians see Lawrence's life as

playing a part in imperial myth-making.

I think it's an easy story.

It's a story of, like, heroism,

somebody who sacrificed almost himself to help another people.

This fits into this concept of British or English exceptionalism,

you know, I mean, that they are a people unlike anybody else.

We are missing a lot of the story that is just simply nothing

to do with Lawrence, that has nothing to do with him at all.

I think it says a lot about the way British Imperial

history is written, or probably more accurately, how it is

received in this country, that the story of the Arab revolt, as it is

told in this country has to centre around this white aristocratic male.

And, as a nation, we need to engage more authentically

with our Imperial past.

But even allowing for a narrative of ignorance, arrogance

and betrayal, there remains something unique about Lawrence.

There's no question that Lawrence marched to his own drum.

He's a rebel, but he's a rebel within the establishment.

There's a great contradiction there.

But, ultimately, he was his own man.

Lawrence of Arabia the film didn't really help his cause,

cos a lot of the Arabs thought,

"Oh, yeah, bloody British again. Oh, they're winning everything."

Whereas, in fact, he did give his all for them at the time.

There was absolutely no doubt about that.

So he was honourable and he was decent.

He did everything he could.

And people who say otherwise have got it wrong.

In his inner core, he was a conscientious

and decent person, who wanted to try and do the right thing,

which is why he was torn apart by guilt.

"I was wrapped up in my burden in Arabia,

"and say things only through its distorting prism.

"I did third parties wrong.

"It wasn't meant, just the inevitable of a commander whose

"spirit was at civil war within himself."

It's partly because of those deep-rooted crosscurrents and

contradictions, which are central to his character and his role,

it's partly because of that, or perhaps mainly

because of that, that we find him so fascinating.

This is the reason why flawed heroes like Lawrence

remain so fascinating to us.

They sort of play out their strengths and their dark side on

the public stage, and their courage in trying to answer some of these

very complex questions about being human, why you're on the planet,

that spurs us on to try

and find some resolution in our personal stories, you know?

But we look to flawed heroes like Lawrence to lead the way.

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