Like every writer, I’m drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. In 1922, Johns was working in London as an RAF recruiter. Into his office walked an inferior physical specimen with a strange air of moral superiority. It was T. E. Lawrence, looking to enlist under an alias.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 962