Free Republic

<p>Peter O’Toole died in London yesterday. He was one of the few actors I was happy to watch in any role. He improved almost anything he was in, although I wish there had been more late-career stuff after his charming turn in My Favorite Year.</p>

Screen legend Peter O'Toole announced today that he is retiring from acting. "It's time for me to chuck in the sponge," he said in a statement. "To retire from stage and screen. The heart for it has gone out of me; it won't come back." O'Toole, who turns 80 on Aug. 2, achieved international stardom and his first Oscar nomination for David Lean's 1962's Academy Award-winning epic "Lawrence of Arabia." O'Toole was 27 when he earned the coveted title role. When he was cast in 1960, The Times quoted a London critic who called the young actor "a blazing new...

He was the best of England and the worst. A wastrel, in many ways, and a triumph, in others. A hero and a clown. A scholar and a soldier. A sophisticate and a naïf. A child and a grown-up. He was an adolescent, all in all: perhaps the greatest lifelong teenager the modern world has ever known, with every bit of the soaring self-confidence and crushing self-doubt the awkward years can bring. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence. Or T.E. Lawrence, as he signed his books, or John Hume Ross and T.E. Shaw, the military pseudonyms under which...

The most controversial incident in the colourful life of Lawrence of Arabia was made up by the celebrated hero, according to new forensic evidence.The brutal sex attack on Lt Col T E Lawrence by Turkish soldiers, which allegedly took place while he was serving as the British liaison officer during the Arab revolt, was considered so contentious that it was covered up by the British Army.   Diary of a lie? The 1917 journal But now, a new history of the Arab revolt is to claim that Lawrence invented the attack in order to smear political opponents and fulfil...

President Bush has the bully pulpit, but Saddam Hussein has the hot novel. Bootleg copies of his latest work are selling briskly in the Middle East, and not just because of the free publicity he got when Jordan banned it this week. Say what you will about Saddam, he knows his audience. The critics have not been kind to the prose and the plot, but they miss Saddam's strength. He's a marketer. He is said to have finished the novel just as the war was beginning, when American leaders were fantasizing about their troops' being welcomed as liberators. But Saddam...

Late in the morning on May 13, 1935, a middle-aged motorcyclist swerved to avoid two cyclists in a leafy Dorset lane. He lost control, flew over his handlebars and hit the road headfirst. Six days later — 70 years ago today — he died, having never regained consciousness. The motorcyclist was T E Lawrence, the hero of the Arab Revolt, the causes and consequences of which have an ongoing significance today. When the Ottomans joined the Germans' side in the First World War, the Ottoman Sultan proclaimed a jihad against Britain. Chilled by this underhand appeal to their 100 million...

THE ARAB OF THE DESERT . . . In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief und unbelief, without our...