The Cambridge Five: England’s Übermenschen (opens in new tab)

Who would have thought that Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch would find one of its most remarkable manifestations not among the “blond beasts” of Adolf Hitler’s Aryan fantasies, but in a handful of effete yet determined young British men, all of whom were educated at the University of Cambridge in the late Twenties and early Thirties. What marked them out, and still marks them out, is their repudiation of the pieties of their time and place in favor of a harsh and uncompromisin...