The Letters of Gertrude Bell is about English writer and traveler Gertrude Bell, who was a great asset to British policymakers due to her experiences in the Middle East. Excerpt: ‘In the letters contained in this book there will be found many Eastern names, both of people and places, difficult to handle for those, like me, not conversant with Arabic. The Arabic alphabet has characters for which we have no satisfactory equivalents and the Arab language has sounds which we find it difficult to reproduce.’