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 séance', 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.  https://oxford.ly/3SU1Wie Darryl Jones is Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and numerous articles, mostly on nineteenth-century literature and popular literature. In 2011, he edited the Oxford World's Classics edition of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories. © Oxford University Press

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