In May 1935, a man on a motorcycle swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles on a Dorset road and died six days later. He was soon memorialized at St. Paul's Cathedral, and most people now picture him as a towering cinematic figure charging across the desert. The real T.E. Lawrence stood five feet five inches tall. This episode sets aside the Hollywood myth to examine the factual and contradictory life of an Oxford-trained archaeologist who became a key military liaison in the Arab Revolt.

The conversation explains how his pre-war archaeological travels in Syria and Arabia doubled as mapping of water sources and routes, his fluent Arabic and study of tribal dynamics, and the Sinai survey that served as cover for intelligence work. It dismantles the lone-savior image by describing the British and French officers already in the Hejaz, his partner ...