17 AUGUST 1962, Page 15

THE LAWRENCE MYTH

SIR,—Perhaps I might add one more quotation in defence of T. E. Lawrence from John Buchan's autobiography Memory Hold the Door: I am not a tractable person or much of a hero-worshipper, but I could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world. I loved him for himself, and also because there seemed to be reborn in him all the lost friends of my youth. If genius be, in Emerson's phrase, 'a stellar, and undiminishable something, whose origin is a mystery and whose essence cannot be defined, then he was the only man of genius I have ever known.