George Gilbert Aimé Murray OM FBA (2 January 1866 – 20 May 1957) was an Australian-born British[1] classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres.

He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century.

His family all supported Irish Home Rule and were critical of the British government's actions elsewhere in the Empire.

[6] In the same year he invited Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to Oxford, where the Prussian philologist delivered two lectures: Greek Historical Writing and Apollo (later, he would replicate them in Cambridge).

Over time he worked through almost the entire canon of Athenian dramas (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides in tragedy; Aristophanes in comedy).

From Euripides, the Hippolytus and The Bacchae (together with The Frogs of Aristophanes; first edition, 1902);[11] the Medea, Trojan Women, and Electra (1905–1907); Iphigenia in Tauris (1910); The Rhesus (1913) were presented at the Court Theatre, in London.

[12] In the United States Granville Barker and his wife Lillah McCarthy gave outdoor performances of The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris at various colleges (1915).

Murray was drawn into the public debate on censorship that came to a head in 1907[14] and was pushed by William Archer, whom he knew well from Glasgow, George Bernard Shaw,[15] and others such as John Galsworthy, J. M. Barrie and Edward Garnett.

It had its Sparagmos, in which the royal victim was literally or symbolically torn asunder, followed by the lamentation and/or rejoicing of the chorus: elements which correspond to the moments of "passion".

The ritual had its messenger, its recognition scene and its epiphany; various plot devices for representing the moment of "perception" which follows the "pathos".

[19]Murray's openly expressed pro-Home Rule and anti-imperialist views, combined with his failure to support the cause of retaining compulsory Greek, antagonised his colleagues at Oxford University, who were mostly Conservative and Unionist.

He made a number of moves that might have taken him into parliamentary politics, initially by tentative thoughts about standing in elections during the 1890s.

[31][32] Murray never took a pacifist line himself, broke an old friendship with Bertrand Russell early in the war,[33] and supported British intervention in the Suez Crisis.

[42] Wells was bullish about pushing ahead with a British LFNA, Murray was involved already in the League of Nations Society (LNS), though not active.

[35] The political position was delicate, as Murray understood and Wells may not have: the LNS overlapped with the Union of Democratic Control, which was too far towards the pacifist end of the spectrum of opinion to be effective in that time and context.

[46][47] Between 1916 and 1924, he conducted 236 experiments into telepathy and reported 36% as successful, although it was suggested that the results could be explained by hyperaesthesia as he could hear what was being said by the sender.

[55] A phrase from his 1910 lectures Four Stages of Greek Religion enjoyed public prominence: the "failure of nerve" of the Hellenistic world, of which a turn to irrationalism was symptomatic.

However, she passed it on to her surviving brother Geoffrey,[63] (his son was George Howard, chairman of the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1981 until 1983) retaining an estate in Cumberland with an income of c. £5,000 per annum.

[64] Gilbert and Lady Mary had five children, two daughters (Rosalind, 1890–1967 and Agnes Elizabeth 1894–1922) and three sons (Denis, Basil, and Stephen) including: The four children were evacuated during the Second World War from London to the Sands House Hotel, Brampton, Cumberland, which was converted to temperance status by Lady Rosalind, and run by Mr and Mrs James Warwick, formerly in her service, with their daughter Charlotte Elizabeth.