When H. St. John B. Philby died in Beirut in 1960, his son had inscribed on his tombstone the words "Greatest of Arabian Explorers." Few would quarrel with this claim. His biographer Elizabeth Monroe wrote in Philby of Arabia (1973) that no other explorer "had covered half so much as he of the huge surface of Arabia. None had drawn attention to so many of its antiquities; none had equalled his spread of maps." Robin Bidwell in Travellers in Arabia (1976) observed, "None of the writers we have discussed saw so much of the Peninsula, visited as he did practically every corner of it nor traversed it so many times in so many ways." Bidwell went on to say that no other Arabian explorer had spent more than twenty months in the region, but Philby lived there for most of forty years. If his friendship with Ibn Sa'ud, the first king...