'One comes away from reading him with a joyous consciousness of having seen for the first time a whole world of unsuspected things.' - Christopher Sykes; 'Byron's skill at detail while delivering sweeping observations on the politics and turmoil of the times, is not only good fireside reading but it should be the aspiration of any serious writer attempting to define a journey instead of a trip.' - Kathleen Buckley; 'It is a volume that will bear reading again and again.' - Daily Telegraph; 'The Station reveals a travel writer of sly, urbane wit with a sense of style and a refreshing vocabulary.' - Arnold Bennett, Evening Standard

Robert Byron was one of the twentieth century's greatest travel writers as well as a noted art critic and historian. Byron's The Road to Oxiana is considered by many to be the first example of great travel writing; Paul Fussell said that it is to the travel book what "Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry"; Bruce Chatwin described it as "a sacred text, beyond criticism", carrying his copy, "spineless and floodstained" on four journeys through Central Asia. Robert Byron also wrote Europe in the Looking Glass, The Byzantine Achievement and First Russia, Then Tibet. He died in 1941, at the age of 35, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a German U-Boat in the Atlantic.