As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition ' Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers Frank & Will had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. Seven Pillars of Wisdom written between 1919 & 1926 tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East
- one which encompasses gross acts of cruelty & revenge & ends in a welter of stink & corpses in the disgusting 'hospital' in Damascus. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is no Boys Own Paper tale of Imperial triumph but a complex work of high literary aspiration which stands in the tradition of Melville & Dostoevsky & alongside the writings of Yeats Eliot & Joyce.