Lawrence in Arabia — Scott Anderson

Anderson structures his account of Lawrence around four parallel figures operating in the same Middle Eastern theatre during the First World War — a German intelligence officer, an American oilman, a Zionist activist, and Lawrence himself — which allows him to show how different national and commercial interests were simultaneously competing for position in the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Lawrence emerges as both a genuine romantic and a man who understood, uncomfortably clearly, that he was being used.