THE ESSENTIAL T. E. LAWRENCE (328 pp.)—Edited by David Garnett—Dutton ($3.75).
Archeologist, British intelligence officer, combat-wise leader of Arab guerrillas during World War I, brilliant theoretician of war, master of English prose—all these, and more, was T. E. Lawrence.
Perhaps the most extraordinary act of his life was his decision, in 1922, to chuck the world's honors and enlist under a pseudonym in the R.A.F. It took six months for Lawrence to be discovered and tossed out—the Air Ministry considered his enlistment alarmingly unconventional. But in those six months Lawrence had captured all the impressions he needed for a corrosive study of barracks...