One minor point is sometimes the text refers to a picture a few pages ahead or behind which means you have to flick backwards and forwards, but this is a minor criticisms. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts conveys the fascination and excitement of encountering some of the greatest works of art in our culture which, in the originals, are to most people completely inaccessible. The binding, the layout and the lavish illustration make it a pleasure to handle before you even turn to the content, which perfectly fulfils its promise. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is an extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts.

The review both brilliant and entertaining was among the very best to appear in this newspaper in my fifteen years of subscription. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. Jeanne de Navarre's ''Hours'' was made for the 24th-century French queen and later owned by Baron Edmond de Rothschild.The Carmina Burana, a 13th-century Bavarian manuscript of 350 mostly bawdy or satirical poems and songs, was written in early gothic minuscule (small letters), yet few of its authors have been identified by name. Fascinatingly, the Mediterranean-coloured pictorial squares of the Parker Library manuscript are said to resemble the primitive-looking narrative cycles of religious scenes found in Ethiopia’s orthodox churches. When not awed by the sheer scope of his expertise or absorbed by his concerted efforts to decipher script or dissect scripture, we are diverted by his light flourishes and witty evaluations.

In the course of a long career at Sotheby's Christopher de Hamel probably handled and catalogued more illuminated manuscripts and over a wider range than any person alive. Part travel book, part detective story, Christopher de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, collectors and the international community of manuscript scholars, showing us how he pieces together evidence to reach unexpected conclusions.With meticulous biblio-sleuthing he seeks to divine the hidden “character” of the celebrity documents under his scrutiny.

From the earliest book in medieval England to the incomparable Book of Kells to the oldest manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, these encounters tell a narrative of intellectual culture and art over the course of a millennium. Palaeographers often base initial judgments on the “aspect” or ductus of a hand, which may include the angle of the copyist’s hand script against the page or the spacing between letters.Might-have-been moments in the lives of manuscripts are familiar to De Hamel, who for 25 years worked for Sotheby’s. Two of the manuscripts visited are now in libraries of North America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Half of the works here were written between the sixth and 11th centuries, when Vikings ruled the waves and men had names like Ecgfrith and Ceolfrith.

It’s a vanishingly rare pleasure, given the commercial constraints of modern publishing, to handle 600 smoothly weighty pages in which the printed text winds its way seamlessly among more than 200 glorious, often full-color illustrations.Deeply edifying and hugely entertaining… [De Hamel’s] curiosity and enthusiasm are infectious and his dedicated sleuth-work and educated guesses are invigorating. One of the cultural highlights of the autumn is an edge-of-the-seat tale inspired by Medieval Manuscripts.