He was a senior civil servant who worked with Sir William Beveridge on the establishment of the National Health Service, applying some of the revolutionary ideas of Robespierre, the Parisian Lefebures having professed Jacobin sympathies.
One of them, Pierre Lefebure, helped to set up the Institut Français, and became a professor of languages at the newly formed University of London.
[2] Her uncle was Major Victor Lefebure (OBE, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and Officer of the Crown of Italy) who, on 5–6 October 1916, carried out one of the most successful cylinder gas attacks of World War I, on the French front at Nieuport.
[1] During World War II she worked as a reporter for a London newspaper and met the pathologist Dr Keith Simpson.
[2] Lefebure was a Coleridge scholar, and among her 20 or so other books was a 1974 biography of the poet, subtitled The Bondage of Opium, which followed a six-year study of drug addiction at Guy's Hospital in London.