The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – 185 pages of purple-dyed vellum – gleams with gold whorls and Byzantine interlace. With meticulous biblio-sleuthing he seeks to divine the hidden “character” of the celebrity documents under his scrutiny. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. de Hamel is not so star-struck that he cannot be critical: a famous illustration in the ''Book of Kells'' is ''dreadfully ugly''; a naked Adam and Eve look ''Knobbly-kneed'' and ''brightly pink like newly arrived English holidaymakers on Spanish beaches''.

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is, like each one of the 12 treasures it celebrates, a book of marvels. 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. He reveals a stupendous discovery has made about this book that no one had noticed in its centuries on this earth. As De Hamel points out, the reformed Church of England was not as rigorously anti-Catholic as its continental equivalents.The idea for the book, which is entirely new, is to invite the reader into intimate conversations with twelve of the most famous manuscripts in existence and to explore with the author what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and sometimes about the modern world too. De Hamel is a man of extraordinary erudition and easy charm; his book asks many questions of the past, and invokes many mysteries. 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. The German composer Carl Orff turned the document’s blocky, black minuscule into a numbingly insistent piece of ersatz medieval folk (used years later in the Old Spice ad), of which the Nazis were very fond. He is the author of many books, translated into numerous languages, including A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, The Book in the Cathedral, and Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wolfson History Prize.

With scholarly elegance, Christopher de Hamel opens the door and invites us to join him for the intellectual expedition of a lifetime.Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

A former librarian of Parker Library at Cambridge and cataloger of illuminated manuscripts for Sotheby’s, de Hamel brings extensive expertise to his meticulous examination of 12 celebrated manuscripts created from the sixth to the 16th century…The book is sumptuously illustrated…A rare, erudite, and delightfully entertaining history. In Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem at that time, tables neatly laid with plates and rolls of bread were not known. The Kindle version, which I hold in my hands, allows magnification, hence progressive discovery of detail.Very little has changed in religious practice in Ethiopia since about the date of the Gospels of Saint Augustine,” De Hamel notes. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy.