Churchill Book Collector

Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE (1868-1926) was the intriguing and influential adventurer, scholar, writer, and diplomat who, like her contemporary T. E. “Lawrence of Arabia” did much to frame and shape the Middle East during and after the First World War.

Raised amid the wealth of her industrialist grandfather, Bell lost her mother at age three, increasing a “sense of independence and self-reliance” perhaps already inherent to the “physically restless and intellectually gifted” child. By her mid-twenties the unmarried Bell discovered intellectual and emotional fascination with the Middle East. “Outstanding literary and linguistic skills” coupled with “determination, bravery, physical strength, and endurance” invigorated contributions to travel literature, translation, archaeology, and architecture, eventually evolving into engagement in the region’s socio-political currents.

By the First World War, Bell became “a voluntary agent of Britain’s interests in the Middle East” and assumed her defining role – as “a woman trying to break one of the most challenging barriers of her time: the physical conquest of the desert and the decoding of the moral and ethical code of its inhabitants.” (ODNB)

After joining the Arab Bureau in Cairo in 1916, Bell was annexed to the military intelligence department in Basrah and charged with gathering information on the movements of Bedouin tribes in central Arabia and in the Sinai Peninsula. Her articles for Hogarth’s Arabian Report and the famous Arab Bulletin ranked among “the best sources of information on the events in the Middle East during the war.” When the Turks lost Baghdad in early 1917, Bell engaged in Mesopotamia’s civil administration. She became oriental secretary under the British high commissioner when an Arab provisional government was established in Baghdad in late 1920, a post she held until her death in 1926 from a sleeping pill overdose.

Bestowed monikers testify to Bell’s deep connection to the Middle East. Bell’s informal honorifics included “El Khatun” (the Lady of the Court) and “Umm al Mu’mineen” (Mother of the Faithful). She would eventually be known to western audiences as the “uncrowned Queen of the Desert”.

Bell is often compared to T. E. Lawrence, who became known as “Lawrence of Arabia”. Both Bell and Lawrence were emotionally wrought and wrenched by their engagement in the Middle East, ultimately frustrated in many of their hopes and ambitions for its peoples. Both died comparatively young. Both have become historically intermingled with their own legends, the person often eclipsed and obscured by the persona. Both were gifted writers and left us with their own words, by which they are best understood and regarded.

Similarities aside, Bell merits an identity and recognition separate from Lawrence. Her published writings range from translated poetry to travelogue to trenchant appraisal and analysis to engaging correspondence. Her own words provide the means by which her remarkable life and work is best understood and regarded.

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T.E. Lawrence

T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) achieved fame from his remarkable odyssey as instigator, organizer, hero, and tragic figure of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, which he began as an eccentric junior intelligence officer and ended as “Lawrence of Arabia.” This indelible experience and celebrity, which he spent the rest of his short life struggling to reconcile and reject, to recount and repress, eventually became Lawrence’s tortured masterpiece, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Lawrence's friend and admirer, Winston Churchill, said Seven Pillars "ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English Language" and called the work “An epic, a prodigy, a tale of torment, and in the heart of it – A Man.” But Lawrence’s literary and intellectual reach far exceeded the world and words of Seven Pillars.

To the point, Churchill said: “Lawrence had a full measure of the versatility of genius. He held one of those master keys which unlock the doors of many kinds of treasure houses. He was a savant as well as a soldier. He was an archaeologist as well as a man of action. He was an accomplished scholar as well as an Arab partisan. He was a mechanic as well as a philosopher. His background of somber experience and reflection only seemed to set forth more brightly the charm and gaiety of his companionship, and the generous majesty of his nature.” (Great Contemporaries, p. 139)

Churchill also said that “Lawrence was one of those beings whose pace of life was faster and more intense than the ordinary…” Lawrence died at the age of 46 following an accident while riding one of his beloved motorcycles. He remains a remarkably complex and elusive figure, of whom it can be difficult to see more than facets.

Fortunately, he left behind a wealth and diversity of written words. His most significant original works – Seven Pillars and The Mint – illuminate not only their subjects from a uniquely perceptive and informed perspective, but also the keen, restive, questing intellect of their author. Beyond these two well-known titles, Lawrence’s published work spans crusader castles and ancient Greek translation to technical manuals on high speed boats. Moreover, his published volumes of correspondence reveal his engagement with an incredibly diverse array of foremost intellectual and political luminaries of the early twentieth century.

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Robert Frost

Iconic American poet and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963), the quintessential poetic voice of New England, was actually born in San Francisco and first published in England. When Frost was eleven, his newly widowed mother moved east to Salem, New Hampshire, to resume a teaching career. There Frost swiftly found his poetic voice, infused by New England scenes and sensibilities.

Promising as both a student and writer, Frost nonetheless dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, supporting himself and a young family by teaching and farming. Ironically, it was a 1912 move to England with his wife and children – “the place to be poor and to write poems” – that finally catalyzed his recognition as a noteworthy American poet. The manuscript of A Boy’s Will was completed in England and accepted for publication by David Nutt on 1 April 1913. Geographically amiss in his praise, Yeats pronounced the poetry “the best written in America for some time” and Frost received some extraordinary tributes and reviews.

A convocation of critical recognition, introduction to other writers, and creative energy supported the English publication of Frost’s second book, North of Boston, in 1914, after which “Frost’s reputation as a leading poet had been firmly established in England, and Henry Holt of New York had agreed to publish his books in America.” Holt’s U.S. publication of Frost’s third book in 1916, A Mountain Interval, was Frost’s first book for which the U.S. edition preceded the British.

Accolades met Frost’s return to America at the end of 1914 and by 1917 a move to Amherst “launched him on the twofold career he would lead for the rest of his life: teaching whatever “subjects” he pleased at a congenial college… and “barding around,” his term for “saying” poems in a conversational performance.” (ANB) In 1924 he won the first of his eventual four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry (1931, 1937, and 1943). Frost spent the final decade and a half of his life as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” with a host of academic and civic honors to his credit. Two years before his death he became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration (Kennedy, January 1961).

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Robert Heinlein

Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988) was one of the “Big Three” American science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer with a career spanning half a century, Heinlein published more than 30 novels, along with numerous short stories and collections. He was already established and successful in the genre when he won his first Hugo Award for Double Star in 1956. He would be recognized thus three more times – for Starship Troopers in 1960, for Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961, and for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 1966.

Noticeable in his early writing, but particularly prevalent after Starship Troopers, Heinlein used his novels to provoke thought and limn his own perspective about the role, limitations, and confining strictures of society, the obligations of citizenship, and the prerogatives of freedom. Heinlein was lauded not just for individual stories, but also for weaving coherent speculative futures, with themes and characters that spanned swaths of his writing over decades.

Heinlein’s “Future History” series was nominated for a Best All-Time Series Hugo Award in a very strong field in 1966, losing (along with fellow nominee The Lord of the Rings) to Asimov’s Foundation series. Fittingly, Heinlein’s name accompanies his imagination into space; an asteroid and a crater on Mars are named after him.

Robert Heinlein’s wife, Virginia “Ginny” Heinlein (1916-2003), was a chemist, biochemist, and engineer who inspired many of the strong, red-haired female characters in his novels. She met Robert during the Second World War when they both worked at the Naval Experimental Station in Philadelphia, she serving in the WAVES. They relocated to Los Angeles after WWII and married in 1948, remaining married until Robert’s death in 1988, after which she edited collections of his correspondence and writings and authorized longer editions of several of his works.

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Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, stories and poems of British India, and his tales for children. Despite this reputation, Kipling’s extraordinary body of work “eludes all labels in its range and variety… Kipling's work is not only of the highest artistic excellence, it is deeply humane and fully expresses the sense of one of his favourite texts: ‘Praised be Allah for the diversity of his creatures.’”(ODNB)

Born in India, Kipling cut his literary teeth there as a newspaper editor and writer, and India’s vividness and vitality clearly proved indelible, both for the author and his readers. Kipling was in his twenties when his stories of Anglo-Indian life made him a literary celebrity, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author.” He was the first English language author awarded and remains the youngest person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kipling’s writing has sometimes been dismissed as rooted in an Empire sensibility that became archaic even before his death. Befitting the transmogrifications Kipling suffered at the hands of Disney films, this is a nearly cartoonish simplification of Kipling’s work - and a disservice to a keen, versatile, and even subversive literary presence.

A broader view of Kipling might see him at his best as an English Euripides, a voice at once both quintessentially of his culture and yet essentially, observationally, compellingly apart, subtly weaving beautifully dissonant patterns in the traditional fabric.

Moreover, Kipling’s literary voice had a remarkable range. “There has yet been no writer of short stories in English to challenge his achievement, which ranges through space from India to the home counties, and through time from Stone Age man to the contemporary world of football matches and motor cars. These stories exhibit every kind of treatment, from the farcical to the tragic, and … vary from the simplest anecdote to the most complex and allusive philosophical fiction…” (ODNB)

Like Kipling himself, his characters are often “Other” to themselves more than to place or to one another. Kipling lived the second half of his life far from India, which he left in 1899. And certainly the sum of Kipling is more than a subcontinent. But, much like Robert Frost in New England woods, it is in the tangled banyan roots of India where we find Kipling especially “lovely, dark and deep”.

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