  This article offers a modern perspective which exposes the many contributions
of Leray in his celebrated work on the Navier--Stokes equations from 1934.
Although the importance of his work is widely acknowledged, the precise
contents of his paper are perhaps less well known. The purpose of this article
is to fill this gap. We follow Leray's results in detail: we prove local
existence of strong solutions starting from divergence-free initial data that
is either smooth, or belongs to $H^1$, $L^2\cap L^p$ (with $p\in(3,\infty]$),
as well as lower bounds on the norms $\| \nabla u (t) \|_2$, $\| u(t) \|_p$
($p\in(3,\infty]$) as $t$ approaches a putative blow-up time. We show global
existence of a weak solution and weak-strong uniqueness. We present Leray's
characterisation of the set of singular times for the weak solution, from which
we deduce that its upper box-counting dimension is at most $\tfrac{1}{2}$.
Throughout the text we provide additional details and clarifications for the
modern reader and we expand on all ideas left implicit in the original work,
some of which we have not found in the literature. We use some modern
mathematical tools to bypass some technical details in Leray's work, and thus
expose the elegance of his approach.
