" Mark Sykes exemplified another characteristic common among the British ruling class of the Edwardian age, a breezy arrogance that held that most of the world’s messy problems were capable of neat solution, that the British had the answers to many of them, and that it was their special burden—no less tiresome for being God-given—to enlighten the rest of humanity to that fact. "

― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East