[1] He went to a number of schools in central England before winning a scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to read English in 1972.
[2] During his time at Cambridge, he was involved with Blue Room, a poetry society founded by John Wilkinson and Charlie Bulbeck.
[3] Any Human Face, his second novel and the first in a trilogy set in modern-day Rome, was welcomed as "a sophisticated literary thriller"[4] by The Guardian and as "a wonderful book, beautifully written"[5] by Eurocrime.co.uk., while for The Daily Telegraph it is "a slow-burning, beautifully written crime story that brings to life the Rome that tourists don’t see – luckily for them".
[18] The Bone Flower,[19] published in September 2022, was described by the San Francisco Book Review as a "classy ghost story, with just the right amount of atmosphere and subtle scares.
Lambert's non-fictional work includes recollections of the poets Jonathan Williams[22] and Dom Sylvester Houédard;[23] critical essays on gay poetry; and, for Critical Quarterly, disability in George R. R. Martin's cycle, A Song of Ice and Fire, in an essay entitled "A tender spot in my heart".