Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons was one of the most accomplished British career diplomatists of the nineteenth century. However, perhaps because—among his many diplomatic attributes—he was highly circumspect in regard to the press, determinedly nonpolitical, and altogether shy of publicity, he has received only superficial treatment in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and we have had to wait a long time for a full-length and properly researched account of his life. (The only previous biography is little more than an annotated publication of Lyons's correspondence produced in 1913 by Lord Newton, who as a young man had served for five years in the ambassador's Paris embassy.) Fortunately, a full biography of Lyons has now been provided in this fluent, confident, richly detailed, sometimes droll, and altogether absorbing work by Brian Jenkins, emeritus professor of history at Bishop's University in Quebec.

The biography has an orthodox structure, taking us chronologically through Lyons's various postings, most of them important: Athens, where he began his long apprenticeship in 1839 at the legation of his nautical father; then, following only a few months in Dresden, to the legation in Florence in 1853, where he rose first to be secretary of legation and then in June 1858 to be minister (in reality, however, being occupied chiefly with the sensitive duties of “unofficial representative” to the Papal States—with which Britain did not have diplomatic relations—and therefore residing usually in Rome rather than Florence); next, to be head of the then hardship and “chronically understaffed” post in Washington, DC, where he arrived in the spring of 1859 as the second Lord Lyons following the death of his father in the previous year and soon found himself having to cope with the well-known difficulties presented to Anglo-American relations by the Civil War; after this, with the promoted rank of ambassador—then shared by few—to the great embassy at Constantinople in 1865, where uncharacteristically he thought himself (and was) a fish out of water; and finally, only two years later, to Paris, where he served for an astonishing twenty years as ambassador at Britain's most important post during one of the most turbulent periods in the modern history of France.

Jenkins succeeds in persuading us that Lyons, from the beginning of his career, was the very model of the modern diplomatist. He was hardworking and capable of adjusting almost imperceptibly the implementation of his instructions to suit local circumstances. With sound judgment and resourcefulness in gathering information without stooping to espionage, he also wrote clear and acutely reasoned dispatches to the Foreign Office. And, tactful in personal relations without being a pushover in negotiations, cool in a crisis, straightforward in his dealings, and a frequent provider of good dinners, he always seemed able to preserve businesslike relationships when these were under serious threat—from hotheads in London as well from those in the capitals to which he was accredited or sent on special service; for example, in early 1858 to Naples (with which Britain did not have diplomatic relations either), where he successfully negotiated the release of and compensation for two British engineers falsely charged with complicity in insurrectionary activity. As a result, Lyons received regular encomiums from London and towards the end of his career was at least twice offered—and twice declined—the post of foreign secretary.

Jenkins does not, however, conceal from us the oddities and less attractive features of Lyons's personality and character. He was “chronically ambitious” and seemed to judge all of his moves by the degree to which they would advance his career. He would also be classed as an outright misogynist were it not for the fact that he had a gushing “mother complex” and doted on his sister; for he resisted all pressures to marry and refused to appoint married men to his missions. Women, it seems, were to Lyons just a damned nuisance, although whether this was only because he believed that they provoked quarrels within a mission and required special provisions to be made for them, is left a little vague. Perhaps, like De Vera in Le parfait ambassadeur (1635), he also believed that they were a diplomatic liability because incapable of keeping secrets.

This book disappoints in only two respects. First, there is no mention in the many pages on Lyons's Paris embassy of Eustace Clare Grenville-Murray, the Foreign Office's homegrown public enemy number one, who fled from London to Paris under a perjury charge not long after the arrival of Lyons and presided over an amazing “literary manufactory” in the French capital until his death in 1881 (A Diplomatic Whistleblower in the Victorian Era; reviewer's website, 2014). It was also Grenville-Murray—a protégé of both Lord Palmerston and Charles Dickens—whose savage satirical attacks on the aristocratic airheads dominating British diplomacy had so fired up the parliamentary campaign for diplomatic reform in the 1850s, a campaign from which—as Jenkins rightly suggests—Lyons's swift promotions at this time probably benefited (81). But I cannot really complain that Jenkins has been guilty of an oversight because Grenville-Murray changed his name and naturally steered well clear of the embassy.

The more serious disappointment is that the book is not reader-friendly, chiefly because note reference numbers are bizarrely placed only at the end of paragraphs (so it is often impossible to identify the source of the numerous short quotations) and because the index has gaping holes and subheads not sensibly alphabetized (for example, “preference for male companionship” rather than “male companionship, preference for”). Entries are the more difficult to find because they are densely presented in run-in rather than indented style. But this remains a most interesting and valuable addition to the historiography of British diplomacy in the mid-Victorian period.