The Manuscripts Department of the British Museum is indeed the historian’s workshop: an extraordinary compilation of human history—23 centuries of documents written by the human hand in a Western European language. From Egyptian papyri to letters of George Bernard Shaw, from the Magna Carta to Gladstone’s diaries, from "Sumer is icumen in" to Mozart quartets, from the illuminations of the Lindisfarne Gospels to Lewis Carroll’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures Underground. The program captures the excitement of seeing and often working with the original, the problems of deciphering different scripts and making sense of a document and its context, the joy of reading history in the handwriting of those who made it. (27 minutes)