Though we continue to live with certain choices of the British Empire, and pay a recurrently heavy price for them, the world will surely never look again with the same wonder and hopelessness upon the likes of those late-19th and early-20th-century officials. Whether in Africa, India, or the Middle East, the British mode of operation grew out of the highest, even noblest, sentiment combined often with the most arrogantly ill-considered policy. Nowhere was this more the case than in their dealings with those desert sheikdoms given over to their jurisdiction by the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.

This is the part of the story that Georgina Howell does not seem to know she is telling in “Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 419 pages; $27.50). Gertrude Bell, who was born in the Midlands in 1868, a well-set-up Victorian girl slated for a fully proper life, turned out to be as gifted as she was fearless. After writing highly respected works in the field of Middle Eastern archaeology, translating Arabic poetry, traveling among the hostile tribes of the Middle East, and serving as a highly valued adviser on Arab affairs, especially Iraqi affairs, to her government — Bell was finally to become a celebrated citizen of Baghdad, where she spent a good deal of time being ill and died of exhaustion (some say suicide) in 1926.