[1] Lynd was educated at Royal Belfast Academical Institution, where he befriended James Winder Good and Paul Henry,[2] and studied at Queen's University.

A 2003 essayist on Lynd recounts that his "maternal grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had all been Presbyterian clergymen.

On one occasion reported by Victor Gollancz in Reminiscences of Affection, p. 90, Joyce intoned Anna Livia Plurabelle to his own piano accompaniment.

In 1941, editor Kingsley Martin decided to alternate it with pieces by James Bridie on Ireland, but the experiment was not at all a success.

[citation needed] Attendance at a performance in London of John Millington Synge's play Riders to the Sea aroused Lynd's Irish Nationalist sympathies.

He is merely a man who has the good or bad fortune to be born in Ireland or of Irish parents, and who is interested in Ireland more than any other country ... the Orange labourer of the north whose ancestors may have come from Scotland, has all the attributes of an Irishman no less than the Catholic labourer of the west, whose ancestors may have come from Greece, or from Spain, or from anywhere you care to speculate.

In March 1924, Robert and Sylvia moved to what was to be their long-term married home, the elegant Regency house of 5 Keats Grove in the leafy suburb of Hampstead, north-west London.

[12] James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle held their wedding lunch at the Lynds' house after getting married at Hampstead Town Hall on 4 July 1931.

Seán MacBride, Minister for External Affairs, attended the funeral as the representative of the government of the Republic of Ireland.