T. E. Lawrence

Lawrence was an archaeologist digging in Syria before the war made him a liaison officer to the Arab Revolt, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom is his account of the campaign against the Ottomans between 1916 and 1918: the march on Aqaba, the raids on the Hejaz railway, the entry into Damascus. He lost the first manuscript changing trains at Reading in 1919 and rewrote it from memory, which is one reason historians handle its detail carefully; his own figures for numbers and distances shift between drafts, and the political promises he describes making were not his to make. He knew that, and the book is at its most interesting wherever he says so. Afterwards he refused the honours, enlisted in the ranks under assumed names to stop being a public figure, and translated the Odyssey. He died in 1935 at forty-six, after coming off a motorcycle in Dorset. The abridgement he prepared for general sale is Revolt in the Desert.