MR James’s ghost stories are guaranteed to provide a Halloween chill. But a Mozart piano concerto? The Simpsons? Three surgeons from Dundee?A large portion of my childhood was spent in the car,driving between my parents’ houses. To enliven these journeys, my father bought a sizeable collection of story tapes. As a consequence, and my sister and I know Three Men in a Boat and The Wind in the Willows nearly by heart. But the one we listened to most often didn’t involve benign picnics by the Thames. The Stories of MR James,read by Michael Hordern, was approximately a different kind of England: misty, or haunted,malevolent.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com