![]() Amongst the very greatest of his scholarly achievements is his 1924 Oxford edition of The Apocryphal New Testament, a collection of marginal or excluded scriptural texts whose intrinsic worth, James admitted, was highly dubious. Nothing could be more inspiriting than to discover that St Livinus had his tongue cut out and was beheaded, or that David’s mother was called Nitzeneth.’ In 1883, the first paper James delivered to the Chitchat Society in Cambridge (to whom he first read a number of his important early stories) was entitled ‘Useless Knowledge’. As a schoolboy, his autobiography records, he became fascinated by ‘blobs of misplaced erudition. ![]() ![]() James was happy to acknowledge this himself. Thus, his research, phenomenal as it was, tended habitually towards apocrypha, ephemera, marginalia -towards forgotten and perhaps deliberately irrelevant subjects. “The potential that ideas have for opening up new worlds of possibility caused James lifelong anxiety. James, Darryl Jones discusses how the limitations of James’s personal, social, and intellectual horizons account for the brilliance of his ghost stories. ![]() In the following excerpt from Collected Ghost Stories by M. ![]()
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