Collected Ghost Stories (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

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Another of the qualities that I admire here is the length James goes to ground his stories in reality. The composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji wrote two pieces for piano with a link to James: Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora (1940), inspired by "Count Magnus", and St. Curl up in your favourite corner during a rainy night, listen to the wind howling in the rafters, and read these stories preferably in dim light. Among his other scholarly works, he wrote The Apocalypse in Art, which placed the English Apocalypse manuscripts into families.

His radio sketch series John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, first broadcast in 2011, features the recurring character of a storyteller (a fictionalised version of Finnemore) who tells tall tales partly influenced by M. If there is a ‘Shakespeare of the ghost story’, it is surely Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), better known to legions of ghost-story readers as M.

R. James's scholarly work uncovered the burial places of the abbots of Bury St Edmunds Abbey in 1903 (from front to rear): Edmund of Walpole (1248–1256); Henry of Rushbrooke (1235–1248); Richard of the Isle of Ely (1229–1234); Samson (1182–1211); and Ording (1148–1157). Far from seeing this as an example of initiative, senior officials at Windsor Castle and his headmaster at Eton viewed it as an impertinent act and he was verbally chastised for it. Corpus Christi College Cambridge: The Parker Library Archived 3 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine at www. H. Malden, although some commentators consider their stories to be inferior to those of James himself.

BBC Four revisited the series at Christmas 2004, and in 2005 began to produce new adaptations of stories by M.

The plot of “The Mezzotint” is classic: a painting of a house slowly changes each night showing a creature leaving a nearby graveyard and making it’s way closer and closer to the house at each viewing. The identification of characters as people that he actually knew adds a whole new dimension to the ghost stories that M. The urbanity and hospitality of the subject of these lines will not readily be forgotten by those who enjoyed his acquaintance.

An archaeologist has a disturbing experience after borrowing a pair of binoculars belonging to an outcast local historian and venturing up a notorious landmark.He summed up his approach in his foreword to the anthology Ghosts and Marvels: "Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo. There is an enormous pleasure to be had reading James's ghost stories, and even if you do not have a decanter and a log fire, you can readily imagine that you do, as his stories are more, perhaps, about atmosphere than about actual horror (for that, I recommend the stories of his contemporary and, I'm fairly sure, friend, EF Benson).

One of the songs, "Three Crowns" (based on the short story "A Warning to the Curious"), also appeared on the compilation album John Barleycorn Reborn (2007). In addition, the central character, Paxton, is changed from a young, fair-haired innocent who stumbles across the treasure to a middle-aged character driven by poverty to seek the treasure and acting in full awareness of what he is doing.

Here is an entry from the diary of the archdeacon of Barchester Cathedral, for October 11, 1816 (or 197 years ago next week): "Candles lit in the choir for the first time at evening prayers. Only vague descriptions are given of the thing: “I can only just manage to tell you now the bare outline of the experience. His ability as an actor was also apparent when he read his new ghost stories to friends at Christmas time.