Robert Byron · 1937 · global

Robert Byron's 1937 travel diary, and the book Paul Fussell called the Ulysses of its form. Ten months from Venice to the Oxus, chasing the roots of Islamic architecture through Cyprus, Palestine, Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan - written in fragments of diary, dialogue and complaint, and very funny about officials, roads and the weather.

1. 1
   Venice

   The diary opens at Venice on 20 August 1933, where Byron and Christopher Sykes take ship for the east - a journey undertaken to look at buildings, and conducted throughout as though the difficulty of getting to them were the joke.

2. 2
   Kyrenia

   They land in Cyprus at Kyrenia, the first stop on a route that will run the length of the old Islamic world - and the pattern of the book establishes itself at once: architecture taken seriously, everything else taken lightly.

3. 3
   Jerusalem

   Through Palestine to Jerusalem and on to Damascus and Beirut, Byron works east by whatever transport presents itself, arguing with consuls and recording what he sees in prose that keeps changing shape to suit it.

4. 4
   Baghdad

   Baghdad he cordially dislikes, and says so - a city he finds has nothing to show for its history - before turning east again into Persia through Kirmanshah, toward the buildings he has actually come for.

5. 5
   Tehran

   Tehran becomes the base for the Persian months, a place of permits, delays and the ludicrous business of obtaining official permission to photograph mosques - all of it recorded with an unsparing eye for the absurd.

6. 6
   Isfahan

   At Isfahan he finds what he came for, and the joking stops: the Friday Mosque and the Seljuk domes draw from him some of the finest architectural writing in English, made out of pure attention.

7. 7
   Herat

   Crossing into Afghanistan at Herat in late October, he sees the surviving minarets of Gohar Shad's college standing in the plain - and the country beyond becomes a matter of snow, lorries, and roads that are theoretical.

8. 8
   Mazar-i-Sharif

   In the spring of 1934 he reaches Mazar-i-Sharif and the country of the Oxus at last - Oxiana itself, the destination of the title, arrived at after ten months of detours, illness and official obstruction.