A dispute over a contract for management of visitors to Dublin's Trinity College, including to the Book of Kells, has come before the Commercial Court.

IT’S almost impossible to believe it now, but in the middle of the 1820s, with the full permission of Trinity College, a bookbinder named George Mullen took a knife to the Book of Kells, slicing off the edges of pages and cutting away decoration that had been painstakingly created by monks 1,000 years before.