His father, Edward Lyons (b. Leeds, 1920), of Polish Jewish ancestry, was an ophthalmologist who set up the first eye clinic at H.M. Stanley hospital in St. Asaph, Flintshire.
His mother, Marian Spence (b. Elland, 1922), of Anglo-Scottish descent, was a nurse who became the first woman to be a Leader of a County Council (Clwyd) in the United Kingdom.
Lyons spent his infancy with his mother’s relatives in Lancashire until 1950, when his father returned from active service in the Middle East, where he was a major in the medical corps.
He was a member of a small group of Oxford researchers (including Colin Lucas, Alan Forrest, Bill Edmonds, William Scott) developing a view of the French Revolution from its municipal and provincial grassroots.
In 1977, finding it difficult to enter the academic job market in Britain, he emigrated to Australia with his young family to take up a Lectureship at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
He was regularly involved in inter-disciplinary team teaching, for instance in ‘Culture and Tradition’, taught with specialists in Politics, Sociology and Literary Studies.
Lyons published Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (1994), commissioned by Macmillan UK, a general history which at the same time contributed to historical debates, followed by Post-Revolutionary Europe 1815-1856 (2006).
During a highly productive sabbatical leave in Paris in 1984, Lyons had attended Roger Chartier’s seminar at the École des Hautes Études – a turning point which both validated his previous approaches and generated many new ideas for future research.
[4] Lyons’ work had turned from the history of book publication and distribution to the study of readers’ responses; he made a further shift into research on the writing practices of peasants and ordinary people.
Lyons returned to the southwest of France, where he had originally served his apprenticeship as a researcher, to prepare The Pyrenees in the Modern Era: Reinventions of a Landscape, 1775-2012 (2018), but this time he embraced sources in Spanish (Castilian) and Catalan as well as in French.
He was a foundation co-editor of Lingua Franca, an electronic journal dedicated to the translation of work in book history originally published in languages other than English (2015-2021).
Various books and articles of his were translated and published in Rio de Janeiro (Casa da Palavra & Telha), Buenos Aires (Ampersand) or Bogotá (Universidad del Rosario), and Lyons made invited lecturing visits to Brazil (1999, 2013), Colombia (2018) and Argentina (2018).