On 24 February 1941 the destroyer transporting Robert Byron to Meshed, Iran, was torpedoed off the north coast of Scotland above Stornoway. There were no survivors. At the time the newspapers reported that he had been on his way to Cairo to serve as a journalist. After the war Byron's friend Christopher Sykes suggested that Byron's last journey had a further purpose, that "secret as such matters always were in the war," his destination "was so blatantly obvious": "his name was Byron and the battle of Greece was drawing near." Although Paul Fussell has since determined that Byron's actual destination had been to report to British Intelligence on Soviet activity in the Middle East, previous speculations such as Sykes's illustrate how thoroughly Byron's readers associated him with daring and even romance. Byron's hatred of the Nazis in the years immediately preceding World War II had been so ferocious and had...