Robert Byron

Robert Byron (26 February 1905 – 24 February 1941) was a British travel writer, art critic and historian. Byron traveled to widely different places; Mount Athos, India, the Soviet Union, and Tibet. However it was in Persia and Afghanistan that he found the subject round which he forged his style of modern travel writing, when he later came to write up his account of The Road to Oxiana in early 1936, in Beijing, when he found himself alone in house of Desmond Parsons, the unreciprocated love of his life. Robert Byron died in 1941, during the Second World War, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a U-Boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland, en route to Egypt. His body was never found.