By Christopher de Hamel
Allen Lane £40
One August day in 1854, a man in a dark frock coat, with a black beard and a large head, was waiting in the market town of Broadway, Worcestershire, for a fly carriage to a big Georgian house three or four miles away.
This was Middle Hill, stuffed from floor to ceiling, in corridors and bedrooms, with 60,000 unique manuscripts, obsessively, ruthlessly and ruinously collected by Thomas Phillipps.
His visitor was