The ‘paperback revolution’, as it is still occasionally referred to, was not ultimately about books or those paper-thin profit-margins, never mind about Penguin: it was about answers — and about people who had never needed them so badly on such a scale. It was about a world that had never spun so giddily nor cried out so urgently to be made sense of. Anyone with a paperback in their hands is holding the history of the last hundred years or so in their hands, whether they know it or not.

In an extended and personal essay Horatio Morpurgo looks into the history of Allen Lane, his Grandfather and founder of Penguin Books. Lane in the 30's gambled on offering cheap paperbacks to the masses, and won big-time. In the 1960s he became a figure that in many ways embodied the ambivalence of the age — defending D.H Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ against charges of obscenity, while at the same time feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the beat culture of the ‘60s.

“ his reasons for championing the novel had nothing to do with any real wish to hurry in the age of Rock and the Pill and LSD, which he was simply too old to understand. In a way his personal intentions of course don’t matter. It is possible for such events to take on their own meaning, different from anything intended at the time. The launch of Penguin in 1935 is a case in point. And yet the meaning of an event can surely never cut completely free from the motives of those actually involved. “

Interesting article, in TMO, by Padraig McGrath who seeks to understand why a large proportion of the people in Crimea want to remain linked to Russia.

For McGrath, a history and philosophy graduate who lives in Crimea, a conversation with a Russian speaker in Simferopol is the starting point for a discussion on the ‘soul of Europe’ — or how Hegel and Nietzsche can explain why so many in the Ukraine are not prepared to have closer ties to the EU.

“It’s important for us to understand why people like Kolya don’t want any part of the European Union. Until we do, we will continue to hide from the internal contradictions of what the European project has become, and therefore fail to understand the reasons for the rapid deterioration of the EU’s standing in the world. Kolya detests what he calls ‘western liberalism,’ and maintains that Europe ‘has become an incubator, a place for babies.’ It is not that he disagrees with the political principles of liberalism as such — rather, he disdains the manner in which the civic values upon which the European Union was ostensibly founded have ‘self-negated’.