He was under pressure to do well and was one of the few boys from the 27 diocesan schools in Ireland to gain admission to the Royal College of St Patrick at Maynooth, where he won several prizes and graduated in 1905 as a Bachelor of Divinity.
After a year's apprenticeship with the Bishop of Cork, he was sent to America to train in Saint Bernard's Seminary, Rochester, New York, where from autumn 1906 he taught rhetoric, but although regarded as a man of the highest talent, he was dismissed in April 1907 for negligence in discharging his duties.
In March 1919, Queen Mary had invited him to Buckingham Palace to lecture on behalf of the Italian orthopaedic surgeon Vittorio Putti, who had developed a technique for attaching artificial limbs.
Shortly after Mussolini's “March on Rome” in autumn 1922, Murphy went to Italy as a freelance correspondent for several British and American newspapers and magazines.
He interviewed Mussolini several times and his reporting became critical of the Fascist regime, particularly after the murder of the Socialist Party leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924.
Murphy's article on “Italian Tyranny”, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1925, so impressed a US Congressman that he had it read in Congress and then reprinted in the Congressional Record.
On his return to London he planned a series of articles for The Forum on modern Irish literature and went to Dublin to interview George William Russell (who wrote with the pseudonym Æ).
Murphy solicited articles or wrote them himself based on interviews with, among others, Arnold Zweig, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, Thomas Mann and Karl Haushofer.
The first two issues, in January and February 1931, drew widespread attention, to the extent that the German Ministry of Education took over the financial responsibility for all the journal's business details.
The book was reprinted in 2001, 2019 and 2021, with tributes to Planck and comments on how relevant it still was, in spite of the huge advances in the application of physical science since its original publication.
Most reviewers depicted it as soft on Nazism, but the Times Literary Supplement commented that it was "eminently readable and well-informed, serves as a wholesome corrective of some of the merely denunciatory generalisations about Herr Hitler and his movement."
An unexpected result was that Murphy received an invitation from the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to work for them as a translator and advisor.
He was more attracted by the opportunity to help inaugurate a new English-language journal Research and Progress, designed to interest foreigners in scientific and cultural topics.
After the war that it became known that she, and her husband Adam Kuckhoff (executed in 1943), were members of the Soviet spy ring Rote Kapelle and that she secretly radioed advance copies of the texts of the speeches to Moscow.
Her appointment at the Ministry of Propaganda on 10 November proved to be an inauspicious one as it was on the morning after Kristallnacht when, in an organised onslaught, Jewish-owned shops and synagogues all over Germany were smashed.
She urged Horst Seyferth, the official she met and knew well, to give her a carbon copy of Murphy's translation of Mein Kampf.
Her arguments proved unavailing, so she suggested that the Propaganda Ministry merely issue a statement to the effect that Murphy had been officially commissioned to undertake the translation.
In November the German publisher, Eher Verlag, made it clear that they would not allow publication of a complete translation, but that Hurst & Blackett was free to re-publish the 1933 abridged version.
The Times newspaper commented, “The translator has made an excellent job of 570 difficult pages, and his straightening out of the more involved sentences and jargon is masterly”.
He had nearly one hundred articles published, as well as a pamphlet entitled “Who sent Rudolf Hess?” He gave numerous lectures, including an address to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House on “The Nazi Propaganda Machine”, but he concentrated on writing a book he had planned over many years on the economic origins of the Second World War.
With encouragement from the publishers Putnam, Murphy completed fourteen chapters, but severe illness, including a heart attack and Parkinson's disease, prevented him from finishing the task.
In an unpublished biography by his widow, Mary Murphy wrote, “James was a man of huge intellect and presence, full of dreams and optimism.