Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was an English scholar and antiquarian who spent most of his life within the hallowed walls of academia, first as an undergraduate and then as don and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and then as provost at Eton, the famous public school that he himself attended as a boy.
Although prolificly published in his chosen academic fields of mediaeval history and literature, theology and architecture, today he is more frequently celebrated as the author of a number of ghost stories first published in magazines and later published in four collections: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925).
Many of his stories were originally written to be read allowed to his friends around a roaring fire at Christmas, and although he has spawned many immitators in the last 100 years, few things can send a shiver up the spine on a cold winters evening like a story from the pen of M.R. James!