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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator. My guest this week is the scholar of manuscripts and antiquarian Christopher de Hamill, whose

breakthrough book for the trade press at least was, a couple of years ago, was called Meetings

with Remarkable Manuscripts in which he talked his way through some of the greatest surviving

medieval manuscripts. His new book is called The Posthumous papers, the manuscripts club. And he turns

attention not to these objects, but to the people across history who have lived with them and loved

them. Christopher, welcome. Good morning. Can you tell me what the angle of your approach for this one

was? I mean, it's sort of partly a travel book almost. Well, the last book, in a sense, was a

travel book in that I imagine going around different libraries, well, I did go around different libraries,

looking at manuscripts, taking the reader with us, explaining how you get there, what you see,

how you look at a manuscript, how you can discover things about a manuscript, but it was really

about objects. This one is about people.

People obsessed with manuscripts throughout all of history.

People who've devoted their lives to manuscripts and why.

And then what that then tells you about the use of manuscripts throughout all of history.

The sort of idea is, if you can imagine going to a conference now on any, we've all done it,

on any specialised subject, in my case it could be manuscripts, but it could be on railway engines or

Mozart or Jane Austen or anything. Everybody there from all over the world has an interest in

common and you all meet as equals as fellow enthusiasts for the subject and the school boy from Texas can sit down at breakfast with a professor from Sarajevo or the town clerk of Glasgow and they talk about their subject with enthusiasm and as colleagues.

And then the idea then is to take that kind of collegiality and to take it right back through history.

I'm fascinated by manuscripts. I love talking about manuscripts. I'm interested in people who know about manuscripts.

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