Robert Byron was born in April 1898. His father, an accountant and a small-time stockbroker, died in the First World War and his mother went to live with her sister, who was married to an Englishman. He was educated at Haileybury and Sandhurst and served as a lieutenant with the Grenadier Guards of the British Army during World War I. In 1922 he became a journalist and reviewer on the Daily Telegraph for two years before joining the Times Literary Supplement as a book reviewer
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In 1927 he moved to Paris, where he first met and became friends with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. From Paris he went to live in Provence, where he wrote his first book on France, The Road to Oxiana (1929).
In 1931 Byron left France for Italy, where his next work on Italy, A Year in Tuscany (published as My Italian Diary), was published in 1932. This was followed by The Isles of Greece (1933) and The Destruction of Sennacherib (1935). After travelling extensively through North Africa, Spain, Portugal and India in 1938–39, he returned to England for good in 1940.
He served in various military capacities including that of General Staff Officer for Intelligence in the Middle East until 1946. His last years were spent writing biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte (1947), Byron (1949), Scott (1956), Shelley (1963) and Disraeli (1967), all published posthumously.