M. R. James in the context of The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance

Fellowship of the British Academy (post-nominal letters FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are:

1. Fellows – scholars resident in the United Kingdom
2. Corresponding Fellows – scholars resident overseas
3. Honorary Fellows – an honorary academic title (whereby the post-nominal letters "Hon FBA" are used)
4. Deceased Fellows – Past Fellows of the British Academy

The award of fellowship is based on published work and fellows may use the post-nominal letters FBA. Examples of Fellows are Edward Rand; Mary Beard; Roy Porter; Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford; Michael Lobban; M. R. James; Friedrich Hayek; John Maynard Keynes; Lionel Robbins; Rowan Williams; and Margaret Boden.

Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European Gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.

Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to paraphrase Goethe in saying that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous. Although "weird fiction" has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, it experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, under the label of New Weird, which continues into the 21st century.

A ghost story is any piece of fiction, or drama, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them. The "ghost" may appear of its own accord or be summoned by magic. Linked to the ghost is the idea of a "haunting", where a supernatural entity is tied to a place, object or person. Ghost stories are commonly examples of ghostlore.

Colloquially, the term "ghost story" can refer to any kind of scary story. In a narrower sense, the ghost story has been developed as a short story format, within genre fiction. It is a form of supernatural fiction and specifically of weird fiction, and is often a horror story.

A Thin Ghost and Others is a horror short story collection by British writer M. R. James, published in 1919. It was his third short collection. "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance" and "An Episode of Cathedral History" had been previously published in The Cambridge Review in 1913 and 1914 respectively; the other stories were first published in this collection.

Several stories in this collection are part of what critic Michael Kellermeyer describes as James' "puzzle-story phase," consisting of oblique tales that require an unusual amount of interpretation.

The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James is an omnibus collection of ghost stories by English author M. R. James, published in 1931, bringing together all but four of his ghost stories (which had yet to be published).

"'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" is a ghost story by British writer M. R. James, first published in his short story collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904). The story is named after a 1793 poem of the same name penned by Robert Burns.

"An Episode of Cathedral History" is a ghost story by the English writer M. R. James, first published in The Cambridge Review on 10 June 1914, and later collected in his books A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931). Sometimes considered a work of vampire fiction, it concerns an incident in Southminster in 1840 where the renovation of a cathedral choir results in the emergence of a malicious creature from a fifteenth century altar-tomb.