For the Dead Remember

The Life of M. R. James
A biography of the greatest writer of ghost stories, M. R. James, who was also the foremost scholar of medieval manuscripts and the occult of his day. This is also the portrait of an age and a generation in changing times, told through the life of one man and the institutions to which he belonged, Eton and King’s College Cambridge.
M. R. James: greatest of all ghost story writers, a repressed member of the English establishment struggling against changing timesEvery Christmas around the turn of the twentieth century, Montague Rhodes James would gather his friends and students together in his rooms at King’s College Cambridge, for what he once described as a ‘dark sance’, in which he read a new ghost story by candlelight at midnight. But the ghost stories are only one aspect of the life and writing of this fascinating, complex, troubled, difficult man. Monty James was widely recognized as perhaps the outstanding sc