Daughter of the Desert

At a time when women were still largely excluded from both education and the workplace, Gertrude Bell was an archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author, poet, photographer and mountaineer - but until the Iraq War of 2003 few people had heard her name. During the course of her extraordinary life she not only abandoned her privileged background of country house parties and debutante balls to become one of the first women to graduate from Oxford; she also travelled into the desert as an archaeologist, where through her command of Arabic and knowledge of tribal affiliations she became indispensable to the Cairo Office of the British government. A friend of T.E. Lawrence, she later advised the Viceroy of India and, during the First World War, travelled from Delhi to the front line in Mesopotamia where she took up and steadily upheld the principle of an autonomous Arab nation for Iraq, promoting and manipulating the election of King Faisal to the throne and helping to draw the borders of the fledgling state.