Robert Byron

• Name — Robert Byron • Born — 26 February 1905 • Birthplace — Wembley, Middlesex • Died — 24 February 1941 (aged 35) • Place of death — off Cape Wrath, Scotland • Occupation — Author, historian, art critic • Period — 1928–37 • Genre — History, travel, non-fiction, • Subject — Greece, India, Middle East, Tibet, Persia, Afghanistan

Robert Byron was born in Wembley, London on 26 February 1905, the only son of three children born to Eric Byron, a civil engineer, and his wife Margaret, daughter of William Robinson, of Southall Manor, Middlesex. He was educated at Eton College and Merton College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1925 in Modern History. At Oxford he took part in the Hypocrites' Club. Byron travelled in 1925 across Europe in a car to Greece, with Alfred Duggan and Gavin Henderson. It led to his first book, and a second was commissioned for Duckworth by Thomas Balston, to be on Mount Athos. He later visited India, the Soviet Union, and Tibet. • Illustration — Shrine of Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa, photographed by Robert Byron. Photograph held in The Courtauld Conway Library of Art and architecture. It was in Persia and Afghanistan that Byron found the subject to match his style of travel writing. He completed his account of The Road to Oxiana in Beijing, his temporary home. His innovation, that set him apart from his major travel writing rival Peter Fleming and others, was to disregard the conventional continuous narrative. An appreciation of architecture is a strong element in Byron's writings. He was a forceful advocate for the preservation of historic buildings and a founder member of the Georgian Group. A philhellene, he also pioneered, in the English-speaking world, a renewal of interest in Byzantine history. Byron has been described as "one of the first and most brilliant of twentieth-century philhellenes". Photographs of Iranian architecture by Byron, taken while he was writing The Road to Oxiana between 1933 and 1934 are held in the Conway Library of Art and Architecture at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He attended the last Nuremberg Rally, in 1938, with Nazi sympathiser Unity Mitford. Byron knew her through his friendship with her sister Nancy Mitford, but he was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis. Nancy Mitford hoped at one stage that Byron would propose marriage to her, and was later astonished as well as shocked to discover his homosexual tastes, complaining: "This wretched paederasty falsifies all feelings and yet one is supposed to revere it." According to Paul Fussell in his introduction to the Oxford paperback edition of The Road to Oxiana (1982) Byron was a fervent and vocal critic of Hitler, "object[ing] in the most violent terms to the Nazification of Europe and abusing those in England who imagined that some sort of compromise with this new wickedness was possible". Byron's great, though unreciprocated, passion was for Desmond Parsons, younger brother of the 6th Earl of Rosse, who was regarded as one of the most charismatic men of his generation. They lived together in Peking, in 1935, where Parsons developed Hodgkin's disease, of which he died in Zurich, in 1937, at 26 years old. Byron was left devastated.

• Robert Byron Papers in General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University