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The fatal Englishman
As her play Blood Gold and Oil premieres this week, JAN WOOLF reflects on the political and personal energies behind the play.
CRUSH: Playwright Jan Woolf confronts her subject T E Lawrence [Jan Woolf/Flight Lieutenant Smetham/CC]

FREUD compared psychoanalysis with archaeology — the delayering of the psyche with the removal of topsoil to get to the buried stuff. Grounding truth, archaeologists call it.

Extend that to digging for political truth. 

The Arab revolt of 1916 against the Ottoman empire — at the time allied with Germany — had the Sykes-Picot agreement for the post-war division of the Middle East lurking in the shadows of duplicitous diplomacy.  

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