M. R. James

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was an English scholar and author, the son of a Suffolk clergyman, who spent his whole life in the institutions he loved: Eton as a boy, King's College, Cambridge, as fellow, dean and provost, and Eton again as provost from 1918 until his death. By profession he was a medievalist who catalogued the manuscripts of the Cambridge colleges. The ghost stories he read aloud to friends at Christmas, collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and three later volumes, made him the master of the English ghost story, with their scholarly narrators, exact settings and single glimpse of something that should not be there.