Halloween horrors: writers reveal their private fright nights ...

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, my sister and I know Three Men in a Boat and The Wind in the Willows almost 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 about a different kind of England: misty, haunted, malevolent.

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