M. R. James: greatest of all ghost story writers, a repressed member of the English establishment struggling against changing times Every 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 s嶧nce', 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 scholar of his generation, a man whose academic achievements were unparalleled, and who became the foremost living authority on medieval manuscripts, on stained glass, on Biblical apocrypha, and on the occult. He was also a formidable academic administrator, as Provost of King's College Cambridge and then as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, he led his institution through the difficult years of the
