High life | 30 April 2015

Talk about how the mighty have fallen. Time magazine was for the better part of the 20th century the model for American newsweeklies. Its style of epigrammatic terseness and punchy prose became known as ‘Timespeak’, the compact format an invention of its founder, Henry Luce. Luce (‘Harry’ to friends and family) was the son of a missionary and was born in China. He was devout, brainy, single-minded and convinced that America was a miracle conceived by the Almighty. In a British boarding school in Shandong, Harry was mercilessly flogged for his insistence, at times, on speaking to God directly, but he also became proficient in French, Latin, Greek, history and maths. He then went to Hotchkiss and Yale. He was voted the most brilliant member of the class of 1920.

Three years later, he founded Time having raised $86,000 from Yale classmates. Six years later, he was a multimillionaire and had also founded Fortune — and eventually Life.