The Migrants

[Christopher de Hamel] combines enthusiasm with scholarly precision and a conversational style that sits surprisingly easily with the fund of knowledge he has gradually accumulated … the joy of this book are de Hamel’s true ‘intimate companions’, the manuscripts, and his ability to evoke the thrill and wonder he feels as he encounters them, whether it’s a 12th-century copy of Boethius he finds in Wellington, probably designed for Thomas Becket, or a Bible in Auckland, which he traces back to a Cistercian monastery in north-central Poland – Mark Bostridge * Spectator *
Christopher de Hamel holds a world of experience. [His] reminiscences of New Zealand are fondly Arcadian, but his imaginary garden is stocked with volumes not vegetation … – Peter Conrad * Literary Review *
[The Migrants] is the most personal of de Hamel’s books. It takes the meeting of the Old World and New as its core subject [and] tells the winding stories of those illuminated manuscripts that he first came upon improbably as a boy and which fostered his sense of wonder. The coming-of-age insights and forays into New Zealand’s colonial context are illuminating in the manuscript sense: adding richness to something already fine. As a story of a life as lucky, fantastical and singular as the journeys the manuscripts have undertaken, it’s a delight – Jonathan McAloon * Financial Times *
Absorbing and often unexpected… The Migrants is about the books and pages that travelled to New Zealand and the young obsessive who reversed their path back to the metropole. – Jo Livingstone * New Statesman *
For 55 years, Christopher de Hamel has been producing coruscating books attesting to his fascination with manuscripts as artistic treasures and witnesses to history, and his empathy with enthusiasts of all countries and times. The Migrants brings the story home, revealing how his own life has been coloured and enriched by these precious pieces of paper, and drawing arresting parallels between the histories of human beings and the trajectories of books …. the author has done a signal service to the land of the long white cloud, writing this most distant domain into the mainstream of history. – Derek Turner * Engelsberg Ideas *

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 The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He lives in London.

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