In 1933, the delightfully eccentric travel writer Robert Byron set out on a
journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to
Oxiana, near the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Throughout, he
kept a thoroughly captivating record of his encounters, discoveries, and
frequent misadventures. His story would become a best-selling travel book
throughout the English-speaking world, until the acclaim died down and it was
gradually forgotten. When Paul Fussell published his own book Abroad, in 1982,
he wrote that The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book what "Ulysses is to the
novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land