“M. R. James’s dark world” by Susan Hill (The Spectator, 18 December 2010)

The array of his academic achievements is still mind-boggling: that’t why I was astonished to hear at one academic event a participant who nonchalantly said that “studies conducted by MRJ were extremely boring and would immediately turn off any modern scholar.” Still blame myself for not challenging this foolish statement at the time.

But James, although somewhat unhappily in charge of King’s, was one of the best Provosts Eton ever had and he was also a scholar of distinction, packing more solid achievement into his lifetime than most men who did not have any sort of administrative work to occupy them.

He had studied classics at Cambridge, became assistant in classical archaeology at the Fitzwilliam Museum and later, as a Fellow, then Dean, of King’s, lectured in divinity. He was a bibliographer, palaeographer and antiquarian, and catalogued every medieval manuscript in the Cambridge colleges, a massive work of patience and dedication. His enthusiasm for everything he did carried him on. He had a passionate interest in the Apocrypha and his translation of the Apocryphal New Testament is still a standard work. He was a naturally brilliant linguist and even taught himself Danish and Swedish in order to read writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and the Sagas in the originals. ©