Few today read Waugh's travel books, or the now very dated works of Peter Fleming, all of which outsold Byron's work during his lifetime. But although Byron had little financial success from his writing while he was alive, he has gone on to be the posthumous literary mentor to almost all the best travel writers who followed him, from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Eric Newby and Colin Thubron to Bruce Chatwin, who wrote that for him, Oxiana was "a sacred text, beyond criticism". In his introduction to the 1981 Picador edition of the book, which brought Oxiana back into print after nearly half a century of neglect, Chatwin tells how he carried his copy "spineless and floodstained" on four journeys through Central Asia. For him it was, he wrote, quite simply "a work of genius". I am not neutral on this either, for I also write as an abject devotee: Oxiana had an electrifying and life-changing effect on me, and was responsible for me wanting to become a travel writer.

In those days, it seemed as if Byron's elusiveness only heightened his mystique. Little seemed to be written on him, and the Picador edition of Oxiana contained only four brief lines of biography: "Robert Byron was born in 1905 and educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford. Among his other books are The Station, The Byzantine Achievement and First Russia, Then Tibet. He died when his ship was torpedoed in 1941." There was no author picture, and few of his other books seemed to be in print. A genius who died in his mid-30s, at the height of his powers, leaving one outstanding masterpiece behind him: for me all this gave Byron a fascination quite unlike that of any of his contemporaries.