Since the spring of 2003, Selwa Press has offered a free PDF download of Gertude Bell’s prescient WW I work, The Arab War. To our surprise it has been downloaded a minimum of a hundred times a month ever since then. This article by Rory  Stewart in the New York Review of Brooks is a masterful overview of the life and times of Gertrude Bell - for better or worse, the mother of the Iraqi state.

Mr. Stewart begins,

“When the British needed a senior political officer in Basra during World War I, they appointed a forty-six-year-old woman who, apart from a few months as a Red Cross volunteer in France, had never been employed. ”

Read the article.