Professor Malcolm Lyons (1929 - 2019)

The College is saddened to announce the death of Life Fellow, Professor Malcolm Lyons.

Professor Lyons was a specialist in the field of classical Arabic literature. His published works include the biography Saladin, the Politics of the Holy War, The Arabian Epic, Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry. In 2008 he published a three volume translation of 'The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights', in collaboration with his wife, Dr Ursula Lyons and Robert Irwin. In 2014, again working with Irwin, he produced the first ever translation into English of  a collection of Arab fantasy stories, 'Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange'.

Reflecting on Professor Lyons's life, Sir Roger Tomkys, former Master of Pembroke, said, "Malcolm came up to Pembroke from Fettes with a Major Scholarship in Classics in 1946 at the age of 17, a schoolboy entering a College full of war veterans. After graduation he did National Service before returning to Pembroke in 1951 to take Arabic in the Oriental Tripos in two years, and join a long tradition of distinguished Pembroke Orientalists. I first met him and his then new bride Ursula in Lebanon in 1961 when he was teaching for an academic year sabbatical and I was trying to learn Arabic at the Foreign Office’s Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies.

"For the rest of his long life Malcolm was based continuously in Cambridge and in Pembroke. Elected to the then small Fellowship in 1956 he covered for Tony Camps, in many ways his mentor, as Director of Studies in Classics as well as for Oriental Studies. A long spell as Admissions Tutor gave him great satisfaction and in more easy going times, brought the College a fair number of good golfers as well as Scholars. In the University he rose to become, from 1985 to retirement in 1996, Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic, a seventeenth century foundation and one of the most eminent chairs in the world of Oriental Studies. His scholarly output was substantial, focussed on medieval Arabic epic and Romance; most accessible is an outstanding translation of the Arabian Nights, to which Ursula contributed translation of the “lost” Nights, for which no Arabic but only early French texts are preserved. He was still working on translations up to his death, but always said he read Classics for pleasure and worked on Arabic because so much basic groundwork still had to be done.

"He was of mixed Scottish/Irish ancestry, the son of a Church of Scotland Minister who died when Malcolm was young. His widow settled in St Andrews where golf and membership of the R&A Club from 1962 provided for Malcolm the cement binding many close friendships in Pembroke and outside. He was himself a notably strong player who won major competitions at the R&A off a low handicap despite a notably idiosyncratic method. He had been a mountaineer in younger days, once rescuing his Pembroke climbing companion from high on Mont Blanc when Ray Dolby, then a Research Fellow was overcome by altitude sickness. He and Ursula loved walking in Suffolk, skiing in her native Switzerland and music festivals in Salzburg. His last years were sadly blighted by her death and his increasing physical disability; he was effectively house and wheelchair bound for the last three years. But Pembroke, with his Pembroke friends and pupils, remained a major part of his life to the end."

Professor Lyons was predeceased by his wife, Ursula, in 2016.