M. R. James

M. R. James spent his working life inside two institutions, as provost of King's College Cambridge from 1905 and then as provost of Eton from 1918 until his death, and his profession was cataloguing medieval manuscripts, a job he did so thoroughly that the catalogues are still consulted. The ghost stories began as entertainments read aloud to friends at Christmas. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary appeared in 1904 and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories in 1925, and between them they fixed a pattern later writers borrowed: a mild scholar, a cathedral library or a stretch of East Anglian coast, an object handled that should have been left where it was, and something glimpsed too late and described too briefly to be comfortable. He avoided gore and preferred the half-seen thing. He came from Kent, born there in 1862, and died in 1936.