Expert Commentary on...
“Oxiana is a coinage of his, and it doesn’t geographically specifically exist. It was a way of saying Persia (as it was to him) and Afghanistan. Byron’s journey starts in Venice and ends in what is now Pakistan. He went there in 1933-34, not long before he died in World War II, drowned when his ship was torpedoed. Although the book is terrifically chauvinistic – he’s appalling when he writes about the local people, almost always without sympathy and sometimes with extreme colonial arrogance – it’s full of wonderful descriptions.”
Colin Thubron, Travel Writer
“Byron was Chatwin’s first conscious model. The book is a candid account of a journey made in 1933 in search of Seljuk tombs.”
Nicholas Shakespeare, Biographer
Sandy Gall
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
