Wallach does an exhaustive job of detailing Bell's many expeditions.

There she undertook the first of many desert treks and began acquiring the intimate knowledge of the Middle East and its peoples that the British would find so useful later on and that she would record in her best-known book, The Desert and the Sown. Soon she was off to Jerusalem to learn Arabic (she had already mastered Persian, publishing a still-read translation of the verse of the 13th-century Persian poet Hafiz). Her love affair with the East, however, was destined to flourish. She loved the desert, the palaces and gardens it was, she said, like being 'in the middle of the Arabian Nights.' Bell's family judged Cadogan an unsuitable match, and he died before she could convince them otherwise. Socially, she was considered less brilliant - no marriage prospects - until she visited an uncle and aunt stationed in Teheran, where she fell in love twice: with a poor but dashing attache named Henry Cadogan, who read to her from Omar Khayyam's 'Rubaiyat,' and with the country itself. The Bells were liberal enough to send her to Oxford (her idea), where she took a First in Modern History - the first woman to do so. Losing her mother early, she doted on her father, Hugh he encouraged her interests in history and politics, while her stepmother, Florence, a playwright, introduced her to the pleasures of literature and society. She was lucky in her family the Bells were rich, having made a fortune in industry in the north of England, and they were progressive. Gertrude Bell had the disadvantage of being born female and intelligent in an era that encouraged women to pursue husbands, not careers. What do a late-20th-century Iraqi dictator and a Victorian Englishwoman have in common? After World War I, when the British set the boundaries of Iraq, it was Bell who showed them where to draw the 'line in the sand' - a line that Hussein so violently contested decades later. $27.50 ANYONE wanting to understand Saddam Hussein's 1991 invasion of Kuwait could learn a thing or two from Desert Queen, Janet Wallach's exhaustive biography of English explorer Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). DESERT QUEEN The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia By Janet Wallach Doubleday.

Desert queen by janet wallach