From the Dust Jacket: "This collection of verse is both an anthology and a very personal reflection of T. E. Lawrence. The components were selected by him, mostly during the crucial period between the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and his R.A.F. enlistment in 1922, and copied into a small, red leather-bound book that he carried with him almost constantly. The contents of that red, leather-bound book are published for the first time.

"The verses contain not only refinements of Lawrence's abiding preoccupations - love, honor, death, hope - but also mark some of the main themes in the important developments in his thinking, such as the post-war disillusion that followed what he regarded as the 'sell-out' of his Arab friends by the British.

"Of his choices, Lawrence wrote, 'One necessary qualification was that they should be in a minor key; another that they should sing a little bit.' And by such little bits of singing - these 'minorities' - a little more understanding may also be acquired of a major figure regarded by many as a mystic and a visionary as well as a legendary warrior and an authentic Hero.

"Writing to Mrs. Bernard Shaw in 1927, he said he had chosen 'the minor poems I wanted. Some are the small poems of big men; others the better poems of small men'...This presents us with one of those enigmas which T. E. scattered so freely about him, to tease and mystify posterity. He cannot surely have considered Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats as 'small men'; but equally it is impossible to imagine him rating the 'Intimations' ode, 'Kubla Khan,' 'Prometheus Unbound' or the 'Ode to a Nightingale' as 'small poems of big men'...'Minorities' was not intended for publication: but, if it had been, I see no reason to suppose that Lawrence's choice of poems would have been substantially different. Being out of sympathy with those persons who have sought, by diminishing him as a scholar, a writer or a military leader, to cut him down to their own size, I maintain my conviction that he was an exceptional human being, and that anything from his hand deserves our interest and respect."

Contents include: Abbreviations; 112 poems such as: Ballad of a Wilful Woman by D. H. Lawrence; Uphill by Rosetti; Hymn to God the Father by Donne; La Belle Dame sans Merci by Keats; To Helen by Poe; Passionate Shepherd to his love by Marlowe; To Marguerite by Arnold; Ode from Intimations of Immortality by Wordsworth; From Youth and Age by Coleridge; Dream Pedlary by Beddoes; From Hellas by Shelley; Faery Song by Yeats; To the Moon by Hardy; Arabia by Walter de la Mare; Forced Music by Graves; Jerusalem by Blake; His Pilgrimage by Sir Walter Raleigh; From Hamlet by Shakespeare; Notes; Indices of authors and first lines.