Gertrude Bell

Who believes men alone have redrawn the maps of the world? Gertrude Bell, beautiful adventurer, mountaineer, archaeologist, writer, linguist, and self-taught photographer, championed Arab self-rule, advising the British military in creating the nation of Iraq after World War I. Thwarted in love, this Victorian debutante set forth on a life as colorful as Lawrence of Arabia, with whom she became a close friend. I marveled at her courage, traveling alone in the vast desert of Arabia with a few native guides, dining with Bedouin chiefs who had never deigned to receive a woman before. It’s impossible to describe her life… show more.

Not many spies create nations, but Gertrude Bell, a multi-talented English archeologist, Arab scholar, travel writer, mountaineer, and intelligence agent, did just that. When fighting during the First World War spread to the Middle East, Bell joined British intelligence in Cairo where one of her colleagues was T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. After the British drove Turkish forces out of Baghdad in 1917, Bell joined the British colonial administration and later drew the boundaries of the country we know as Iraq from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.