Bruce Leigh, a British writer and intellectual with a wide range of interests who worked in libraries and bookshops, has died, the Guardian reported. He was 75. Leigh worked for the bibliographic services division of Marylebone public libraries in London (1970-72), and then as assistant librarian at Kensington reference library. He spent 10 years as manager of the paperback department at the Karnac Books shop in Gloucester Road, central London (1975-85), and then moved to Waterstones in Charing Cross Road shop as an assistant buyer.
"It was as colleagues at Waterstones that we met, and he became a mentor for me, not just in books but in life," recalled his friend Fiona Mullen, who wrote that Leigh "had an interest from his early teens in Lawrence of Arabia, and, dissatisfied with popular interpretations of his life, sought to understand the man through the large and eclectic library that Lawrence left behind at Clouds Hill, his house in Dorset. The result, after 10 years of writing, was Bruce’s study, Lawrence: Warrior and Scholar (2014)."