The book gives an account of the extraordinary life of Sir James Lyon who was born posthumously on board a transport ship returning to England after the Battle of Bunker Hill (1775). The greater part of it deals with his participation as an infantry officer in several of the campaigns of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Egypt (1801), the Peninsula (1808-11), North Germany (1813-14), and Waterloo (1815). Most of the remainder looks at his involvement in the post-war political and social unrest in England around the time of the Peterloo Massacre (1819), and in the West Indies immediately prior to the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act (1833).

This book continues the various genealogies of the family published in The Lyons of Glamis 1350-1750 in 2015. From 1750 onwards, the heads of the family, the earls of Strathmore, unlike many of their aristocratic counterparts, have managed to hold of their titles and much of their estates through a helter-skelter of marriage, debt, and legal arrangements. However, the vast majority of their cadets, including the offspring of the main family, the Bowes-Lyons, have diversified socially and geographically. They have moved away from the old order and their time-honoured localities to all parts of the world.

George Francis Lyon (1795-1832) was a rare combination of African and Arctic explorer. A 'pop star' of his day, he caught the public's Romantic imagination by battling against untrustworthy allies, callous slave owners, destitution, and disease in the desert, and by struggling against freezings, hunger, thirst, and over-exertion in the Polar region. The geographical detail in his journals helped to lay the path for other explorers and his genuine interest in the communities he visited, very unusual for the time, proved invaluable to later anthropologists. After serving on several ships, he joined Joseph Ritchie's ill-fated expedition to North Africa (1818-20). The Admiralty appointed him to command HMS Hecla and he accompanied Edward Parry in HMS Fury on Parry's second Arctic expedition (1821-3). In 1824, the Admiralty assigned George to HMS Griper with orders to go to Repulse Bay and undertake an overland expedition. The Royal Navy shunned him after he failed to reach his destination. He then managed mines in Mexico and Brazil where his relentless ambition eventually killed him. Many of his accomplished drawings illustrate this book which is the first to cover his extraordinary and fascinating life and travels in full.

This book revises the standard accounts of the Lyons of Glamis. It describes how the family emerged as an entity in the mid-fourteenth century because of Sir John Lyon's links with a group of prominent crusaders, and how it expanded and progressed over the next four hundred years. If there is a unifying theme to the seven essays in Part One, then it is the shift from a family structure largely based on feudal values to one that promoted the political and economic independence of its members. The essays provide a backdrop for the fifteen genealogies that follow in Part Two. They deal with the main stem and the several known branches of this most remarkable Scottish family. Front: detail from W. F. Lyon, The Genealogical Tree of the Family of Lyon (London, 1861).