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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
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Listings for Author:  

T.E. Lawrence

 

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T.E. Lawrence : The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

'Derek Davies could not recall that his mother had ever read a book. His father, a die-caster in an automobile factory, read only local and sports papers and two novels a week - a Western or a detective thriller: "Yet quite unintentionally he gave me... a love of reading... He never seemed to vary the diet, he never discussed either the books he read or newspaper items, and he never urged me to read for myself... I... was soon reading everything he read. by the age of eleven or twelve I must have read a couple of hundred of his novels..." In addition to the newspapers and his father's novels, he consumed books for younger children and travel books for adults ("Tibet, I remember, was one passionate preoccupation"). He jumped from the "Wizard" and "Hotspur", which his parents considered "trash" to their twenty-two bound volumes of "The Illustrated News History of the 1914-18 War". "Undeterred by the fact that I had neither the space nor the money to embark on even the most modest layout, I consumed book after book on the building of model railways. Gradually, as I found out how to use the School Library and the Public Library, some degree of selection took place, but as nobody at school before the sixth form advised me what to read the selection remained distinctly erratic... At about fourteen... I read every word of T.E. Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', although I had only the faintest glimmer of its real significance".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Derek Davies      Print: Book

 

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