English travel writer Robert Byron was BOTD in 1905. Born in London to a middle-class family with aristocratic lineage, he attended Eton College and Oxford University. He formed part of the louche group of aristocratic socialites known as the Bright Young Things, including Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Tom Driberg, Hamish St. Clair-Erskine, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, Brian Howard, Hugh Lygon, James Lees-Milne, Tom Mitford, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Stephen Tennant and Evelyn Waugh. He also developed a close friendship with Nancy Mitford, who waited (unsuccessfully) for him to propose marriage. After discovering he was homosexual, she complained, “This wretched paederasty falsifies all feelings and yet one is supposed to revere it.” In 1925, he undertook a motor tour of Europe with his friends Alfred Duggan and Gavin Henderson, which inspired his 1926 travel book Europe in the Looking Glass. He was then commissioned to write The Station, a survey of the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece. He spent most of the 1930s travelling in India, the Soviet Union and Tibet, settling in Peking where he lectured at Peking National University. He had a passionate, if unrequited, relationship with his school friend Desmond Parsons, living together in China until Parson’s death from cancer in 1937. In the same year, Byron published The Road to Oxiana, chronicling his travels through the Middle East and Afghanistan. The book was a major success, notable for its poetic and non-linear narrative, becoming one of the most popular travel books of the 1930s. In 1938, he attended Hitler’s Nuremberg Rally with Nazi sympathiser Unity Mitford. Unlike Unity (who went on to become Hitler’s close friend), he was horrified by Nazism and became a vocal opponent of fascism. In February 1941, he travelled via cargo ship to Egypt, intending to travel from there through West Africa. The ship was torpedoed by a German submarine in the North Atlantic, killing most of its passengers. Byron’s body was never found, and he was declared dead, aged 35. His writings fell into obscurity until the 1970s, when he was championed by travel writer Bruce Chatwin, who cited The Road to Oxania as a major influence on his work.