Letters home - Lucy Butler

Robert Byron is best remembered now for The Road to Oxiana. Less well-known is that, like many of his generation, notably Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, he was an entertaining letter-writer. He also had much opportunity to write, travelling widely as he did in pursuit of his enthusiasm for Byzantine and Islamic art and architecture. Some of his travels he turned into books; The Station in which he recounts his journies to Mount Athos; First Russia, then Tibet. In each case, his letters home provide a vivid and often hilarious account of the reality underlying the text.;As well as strenuous forays to far-flung parts of the globe, these letters record his years at Eton and Oxford, enlivened by friends like Henry Yorke and Harold Acton, and also his developing career as a writer, his lecture tours to America and his reactions to impending war. They chart the maturing of a rare intelligence.