When Robert Byron wrote The Station, he was twenty-two years old. Few other people write books when they are twenty-two, but then Robert Byron was not like other people. He had, moreover, written one book already. Europe in the Looking Glass, a typically ebullient record of a journey with two Oxford friends through Germany, Italy and Greece, had been published in 1926, when he was twenty-one. It is very much a young man’s book – how could it have been anything else? – yet already on almost every page there are flashes of the biting wit, the astonishing power of visual observation, the faintly mannered style with its occasional fearless plunges into the purple patch, the perceptiveness so acute as sometimes to verge on clairvoyance (such as when he writes of Bavaria that ‘it is here, more than in Prussia, that the survival of militarism is to be feared’) that were to be the hallmarks of his later voice.

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