Lawrence: My heroics just a yarn
TWO letters by Lawrence of Arabia – in which he calls his epic autobiography of his First World War heroics “a yarn” – are expected to fetch £ 5,000 at auction this month.
T. E. Lawrence’s 1927 book The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom was the basis of the Oscarwinning 1962 film Lawrence Of Arabia.
But in a letter to his Army friend Lt Col Sir Henry McMahon, Lawrence says he “wrote a yarn of the Arabian effort... you figured in it, just a little.”
In the second letter he says of artist William Roberts’s portrait of McMahon: “It’s very severe and structured, wickedly like you.”
The auction, by Bonhams in London, is on December 17.