Education
Murray attended the University of Oxford, where he had a somewhat unsavoury reputation, and Evelyn Waugh met him there in 1922.
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Basil Murray
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Murray would later provide Waugh with the model and first name for his anti-hero Basil Seal, star of the novels Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags. Murray became involved in anti-Fascist politics after Hitler"s rise to power and in 1936 managed to incite a riot by heckling the British fascist Oswald Mosley during a speech at Oxford University. He was subsequently tried and convicted of breach of the peace in a proceeding described by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin as a disastrous miscarriage of justice.
As a journalist, he covered the Spanish Civil War from the Republican side, making radio broadcasts from Valencia.
He died in Spain, purportedly of pneumonia. According to a memoir by journalist Claud Cockburn, however, Murray was bitten to death by his pet ape while lying in a drunken stupor in a Valencia hotel.
