Tales from the Queen of the Desert by Gertrude Bell

It's the real East, and it is stirring things are happening here, and the romance of it all touches me and absorbs me. 'I don't care to be in London much,' she once wrote. For years she was his closest personal and political adviser, a position that earned her the title of 'Uncrowned Queen of Iraq.' She was instrumental in determining the borders of the new nation of Iraq and in choosing its first ruler, Prince Faisal. He invited 39 men and one woman-Gertrude Bell. When Winston Churchill was made Colonial Secretary in 1921, he summoned his greatest experts on the Middle East to a conference in Egypt to determine the future of Mesopotamia. 'Furthermore, she could fathom who would be friends and who would be foes of the British.' As a result, she was the only woman drafted as an intelligence agent in the Arab Bureau in Cairo.īell's firsthand knowledge of Iraq and Persia continued to be invaluable during the postwar years. She 'had mapped uncharted sands, noting the location of water wells and railway lines,' writes author Janet Wallach. In World War I, Bell became a vital source of information to the British. Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story. The Arabs pronounced her a 'daughter of the desert.' Similar books like Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell. author, poet, photographer, mountaineer and nation builder, Gertrude Bell was. In Switzerland the brilliant and bold Victorian climbed unexplored icy peaks, in Turkey she visited remote ruins, in Mesopotamia she studied Arabic and rode sidesaddle across the Arabian Desert, venturing where few Westerners had dared go. Queen of the Desert is her story, vividly told and impeccably researched.

'Few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel,' she once wrote. John Philby, and an intimate of Arab sheiks. Extracts from two of Bell's most compelling works of travel writing, Persian Pictures and Syria: The Desert and the Sown, as well as some of her most fascinating letters A woman far ahead of her time, Gertrude gained a first from Oxford at a time when very few subjects were even open to women. Adventurer, archaeologist and Arabist, Gertrude Bell was a counselor to kings and prime ministers a colleague of Winston Churchill and Lloyd George a crony of T.E.

Tales from the Queen of the Desert by Gertrude Bell