Christopher de Hamel for The Migrants

In the course of a long career at Sotheby’s and at Cambridge University, Christopher de Hamel has probably handled more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive and his delight and enthusiasm in them run through all he writes.His many books, translated into numerous languages, include _A History of Illuminated Manuscripts_, _Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts_ (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize), _The Book in the Cathedral: The Last Relic of Thomas Becket_ and T_he Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club_.Christopher joins us for his astounding new book, _The Migrants: A Memoir in Manuscripts_.

This is a coming-of-age saga with extraordinary twists, crossing many hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles, recounted with passion, humour and a lifetime's reflection._Christopher de Hamel is one of the world's best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts.

He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four.__This book magically evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realization that they too are migrants far from home.__The Migrants explores the immense journeys of books and people.

It is a tale of colonization and the migration of culture - of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters - bringing us face-to-face with history.__We meet the colonial governor on his paradise island, the shipwrecked accountant, the nonagenarian who cut up manuscripts, the magnate who unknowingly bought Becket's Boethius and the early settler who inscribed his Book of Hours in the Maori language in 1842._