A Life without a Jolt

• BuyCollected Ghost Stories by M.R. James
  Oxford, 468 pp, £14.99, October 2011, ISBN 978 0 19 956884 0

He always comes on his own, this bachelor of antiquarian tastes. Sometimes he is a book dealer, more often an academic. He is a dry, crotchety character, not particularly sympathetic. He is usually on holiday, in East Anglia or an old town in France or Denmark. He is staying in an inn or a hotel, an uncongenial sort of place far from his familiar institutional comforts. In fact he is way out of his comfort zone. And then it begins … the tapping at the window or the rustling or the tangling of the bedsheets.