Christopher de Hamel’s publishers boast that he “has probably handled more medieval manuscripts than any one else alive”.

In his earlier, tour de force, Wolfson Prize-winning Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016), that is what de Hamel himself wrote of the consummate antiquary M.R. James. James was a Suffolk rector’s son, an alumnus of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. De Hamel’s education was at King’s High School, Dunedin, and the University of Otago. How on earth did he fall into such work? New Zealand, where his family emigrated when he was four, was as far away from Europe, the cradle of medieval manuscripts, as one could get.

The answer, ostensibly, is to be found de Hamel’s new book, but The Migrants is less a “memoir” than a series of re-engagements with the manuscripts of his antipodean youth – more of his inimitable, step-by-step inquiries into provenance, context and scribal history that read like the subtlest, most sinuous of detective stories.

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