Towards the start of his own effort at an autobiography, M R James observed that it was best understood as ‘a study of still life’. It was, in truth, as much a miniature as anything else. Certainly, the memoir, Eton and King’s, described a strikingly small and unchanging compass. James arrived at Eton in 1876 as a schoolboy of fourteen, proceeding to its twin foundation, King’s College, Cambridge, at the age of twenty. He would remain there as scholar, fellow and ultimately provost for the next thirty-six years before returning to preside over Eton until his death in 1936. On reading these recollections, Lytton Strachey, who had started out on a similar path but escaped Cambridge for Bloomsbury, was struck by the ‘extraordinary impress an institution can make on an adolescent mind’.

As the title of his memoir made clear, James did indeed live his life in and through institutions. He was not unique in that respect, of course. Aside from three years’ study at Cambridge, William Vincent, who was a Westminster schoolboy before serving as undermaster, second master, headmaster, prebendary and then dean at the turn of the 19th century, barely left the precincts of Westminster Abbey from the age of seven. Derek Parfit, that great 20th-century philosopher, moved seamlessly from Eton to Oxford and, in the words of his wife, had ‘no idea what it is for a building to exist without a manciple and domestic bursar’. But, even so, James was seen by his contemporaries as exceptionally bound up in the institutions that nurtured, fed and housed him. 

Moreover, the effects of this institutionalisation were, in his case, especially pronounced, fixing his character so it remained seemingly frozen over time. ‘It’s odd’, Strachey went on to muse, ‘that the Provost of Eton should still be aged 16.’ Unfortunately, the sixteen-year-old James was not an attractive boy. He was