Lawrence of Arabia, meet Curt of Cairo

How do you write a new book about T.E. Lawrence, especially when the man himself described his escapades, or a version of them, with such inimitable genius? Scott Anderson’s answer is to intercut Lawrence’s extraordinary story — the camel raids and blown-up bridges, the rape and torture, the lies and shame — with those of three contemporaries, all supposedly engaged in a grand intelligence duel in Syria and Arabia.

Alongside Lawrence, the principals are the German playboy and scholar-spy Curt Prüfer, who tried to ignite his own pan-Islamic uprising on behalf of the Ottoman empire; the ‘Yankee blueblood’ William Yale, who intrigued in the region on behalf, principally, of Standard Oil of New York; and the Zionist agronomist and spymaster — a splendidly unlikely combination — Aaron Aaronsohn, who helped prick Britain into backing the idea of a Jewish homeland.

Aaronsohn is the most interesting of the supporting trio. A bloated bull of a man, he matched Lawrence for arrogance, but with the physical size and belligerence to go with it; Lawrence, of course, was short and shy. A pioneering Jewish settler in Palestine, Aaronsohn established a clandestine pro-British and anti-Ottoman spy network known, after words in the Book of Samuel, as Nezah Israel Lo Ieshaker, or ‘the Eternal One of Israel does not lie or relent’. As Anderson drily observes, NILI was a name ‘too exotic for the British’, who referred to it as Organisation A.

NILI’s creation is a significant landmark in the pre-history of Israel, but Aaronsohn’s own achievements were disappointingly slight. As he kicked his heels outside British military offices, NILI’s work in Palestine was continued by his fiery younger sister, Sarah. She deserves more than the few lines given her, what with the fact that she was ardently loved by her own followers, and what with the manner of her death.