Birth of F.S.L. Lyons, Historian and Biographer

Francis Stewart Leland Lyons FBA (11 November 1923 – 21 September 1983) was an Irish historian and academic who was Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1974 to 1981

Lyons, Francis Stewart Leland Lyons, was born on November 11, 1923, in Derry, Northern Ireland.

He served as the Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1974 to 1981. He was not only a historian and biographer but also played a significant role in academic administration during his tenure as Provost.

Lyons became Provost of Trinity College Dublin in 1974, but relinquished the post in 1981 to concentrate on writing. He won the Heinemann Prize in 1978 for his work in Charles Stewart Parnell. He wrote Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 which won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize and the Wolfson Literary Prize for History in 1979. Lyons was also awarded honorary doctorates by five universities, and had fellowships at the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy. He was Visiting Professor at Princeton University.

His principal works include Ireland Since the Famine, the standard university textbook for Irish history from the mid-19th to late-20th century, which The Times called “the definitive work of modern Irish history” and a biography of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Lyons was critical of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s much-acclaimed history of the Great Irish Famine and has generally been considered among the “revisionist” historians whose political sympathies underplayed the negative role of the British state in events like the Famine