(In some of the later stories he toys with this convention a little, breaking the fourth wall, as it were. A significant proportion of them have a first-person narrator who is telling the story to colleagues in his club, his college ‘set’ or some other equally male setting – precisely as James himself did during the years when he read each new story as a Christmas or New Year treat for students at King’s College, Cambridge. James’s stories their unique flavour? There is the background of ancient universities and libraries, the wind-scoured winter coasts of Suffolk and Norfolk, of deserted country churches and decaying country houses the gas-lit streets of Victorian and Edwardian London, and the (entirely male) world of public schools, antiquarian research and bibliophily. It was so different from the story I remembered that on Christmas morning I reread the original – and this turned out to be such an instructive exercise that I spent several days dipping into the best of the stories yet again. However, like millions of other viewers on Christmas Eve my family watched Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of James’s The Mezzotint. I didn’t expect to spend so much of Christmas 2021 rereading M.R.
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