The Real and Assumed Personalities of Famous Men: Rafael De Nogales, T. E. Lawrence, and the Birth of the Modern Era, 1914 - 1937

Kim McQuaid

London: Gomidas Institute, 2010,
172 pp. includes map and photos. ISBN 978-1-903656-97-6, paperback,
UK£14.00 / US$22.00
To order please contact books@gomidas.org

"What a life! Rafael De Nogales was one of the 20th century’s great soldiers of fortune. A Venezuelan revolutionary, a Great Plains cowboy, a Turkish army officer who witnessed the Armenian massacres, a journalist who interviewed Sandino in the jungles of Nicaragua, and, perhaps above all, a flamboyant and serial liar: Nogales was clearly a man for our times. As Kim McQuaid argues in this fascinating book, however, Nogales’s life was more than a mere adventure. He stood at the nexus of the great problems of the era: bloody ethnic conflict, western imperialism, the politics of big oil, the "entangled histories” of east and west, and the rising nationalisms of the oppressed. Nogales never did get the David Lean film he deserved, but McQuaid has done us all a service by bringing this forgotten epic back to life." --Dr. Rob Citino, author of The Path to Blitzkrieg, Quest For Decisive Victory; Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm, The German Way of War, and The Death of the Wehrmacht.

T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) and Rafael De Nogales (1879-1937) had careers which intersected and clarified many of the major attributes of the modern era. These include the rise of cheap energy, the oil age and global petroleum companies; the birth of the modern "Middle East"; the rise of religion as a political marker in emerging societies; and the slow decline of British imperial ascendancy and the gradual rise of the "dollar diplomacy" and increasingly global military activities of the U.S.A. Other key changes were heightened concerns about "crimes against humanity" involving massacres, ethnic cleansing and genocide and the increasing use of electronic media like radio and films as political mobilization machines and propaganda and persuasion tools. "Lawrence of Arabia" was one of the most famous figures to emerge from World War I. His Venezuelan contemporary, Rafael De Nogales, remains almost completely unknown outside of his native country. One fought with the Arabs against the Turks; the other fought with the Turks against Arabs, Armenians, Australians, British and Russian forces. Comparing and contrasting the careers of the two men helps clarify differences and similarities in historical narrative and analysis of a formative period of world affairs.

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