Extract: The four books of short stories written by Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, have been collected in a single but not overly bulky volume under the imprint of Longmans, Green & Co. One can heartily recommend the acquisition of this…

Description: When Dr Montague Rhodes James of King's College, Cambridge, published in 1904 the first volume of the elegant but alarming tales with which his name is now always associated, he called it Ghost Stories of an Anti-quary; in 1911 he followed it with…

Description: Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936)\1/ is best known to scholars of early and medieval Christianity for his many publications of relatively obscure texts and related details, and especially his influential anthology The Apocryphal New Testament (1924),…

Description: ‘Remember, if you please … that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that
the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian fruit’.1 These
words, spoken by the narrator of M. R. James’s 1925…

Description: ‘Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te’: ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you’.1Such is the enigmatic warning conveyed to the unfortunate Mr Sampson in A SchoolStory, one of the ghost stories of the…

Description: In his ‘antiquarian’ ghost stories, Montague Rhodes James sought to examine the male character sub specie ludi, as solitary types who – in their sensitivity to inherently playful, or ludic, situations – are launched into a…

Description: The ghost stories of M. R. James, considered by many to be the best in the English language, are currently enjoying critical attention. Yet despite their richness in imagery suggestive of modern critical concerns - sexuality, cultural/political…