A small archive of material from the papers of Lionel Curtis, relating to his address given at the dedication of the Oxford High School memorial to T.E. Lawrence.

£10,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Lionel Curtis was one of the founders, with D.G. Hogarth, of The Round Table , a rather secretive quarterly review and debating circle which was to wield a certain influence over foreign policy in the early years of the twentieth century. After meeting Curtis in 1918 at the Paris Peace Conference (where Curtis was a member of the League of Nations section of the British delegation) Lawrence contributed an essay to the journal, and became a close friend and admirer. Curtis later became a fellow of All Souls and was one of Lawrence’s advisers on the finances of the Subscriber’s edition of Seven Pillars . The correspondence begins with a retained carbon of a TLS, dated Sept. 26 1936, from Curtis to [Robin] Buxton, who served with Lawrence in Arabia and later became his bank manager, and with Curtis an adviser on the printing of Seven Pillars , and later a trustee of Revolt in the Desert . The letter announces Curtis’s success in persuading Winston Churchill to give the speech at Oxford, and asking for help in compiling a list of those who might dine together afterwards. The next item is a fine two-page TLS from Churchill to “My dear Lionel” dated 26th September 1936, making arrangements for the speech, in which he gives instructions on how to handle its reporting by the press: “their usual method is to cut out every third sentence, which has the effect of taking up a lot of their space, but confronting the reader with a thoroughly mutilated and vicious version… if you can’t sett

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