Sunday 16:00-16:30, repeated Thursday 16:00-16:30, except first Sunday in the month when it is replaced by Book Club.
Open Book spotlights new fiction and non-fiction, picks out the best of the paperbacks, talks to authors and publishers, and unearths lost masterpieces.
This week
Sunday 25 December 2005
70 years after the death of celebrated short story writer M R James, Kate Mosse explores his life and work. (Photo: Michael Horden in 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' adapted for television).
M R James (1862 - 1936) was a former provost of King’s College Cambridge and started a tradition of reading a ghost story every year on Christmas eve, around an open fire, by the light of a single, solitary candle. Despite having written only 31 stories, M R James is credited with being the father of the modern English ghost story and is very much a writer’s writer – Ruth Rendell, Penelope Fitzgerald and Jonathan Miller number among his many fans. The ghosts themselves are very ghoulish, often hairy and long fingernailed and often wanting and having contact with humans. But what made this donnish medieval scholar write such tales, what connection did they have with his own Christian belief and where did the tradition of the Christmas ghost story come from in the first place?
Kate Mosse celebrates the spirit of Christmas, in an M R James special, recorded at King’s College Cambridge, in the company of biographer Richard Holmes, novelist Julie Myerson and short story writer and poet Tobias Hill.
Booklist
M R James short stories:
Canon Alberic's Scrapbook.
Publisher:Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
ISBN:1840224258.
Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad, Lost Hearts and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
- all in 'Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories'.
Publisher:Oxford Paperbacks.
ISBN: 0192837737.
Collected Stories of M R James.
Published by: Palgrave McMillan.
ISBN: 9997538463
Other books mentioned:
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Publisher:Flamingo.
ISBN: 000654360X
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.
Publisher:Vintage.
ISBN: 0099288478
The Apocrypha.
Publisher:Cambridge University Press.
ISBN: 0521506743 0521506743
Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd.
ISBN: 0140621008
