Read of the Week (July 20 to July 26)

By founding Penguin Books in 1935 and popularising the paperback, Allen Lane not only changed publishing in Britain — he was also at the forefront of a social and cultural revolution.

In The Man Who Changed the Way We Read, author-biographer Jeremy Lewis brings this extraordinary era brilliantly to life. Lane’s books gave millions of people access to what had previously been the preserve of a wealthy few; they alerted the public to the threat of Nazi Germany; and Penguin Books itself became a cherished national institution in Britain, much like the BBC and the National Health Service (NHS), whilst at the same time challenging the status quo through the famous Lady Chatterley case. This is the spellbinding story of how a complex, highly fallible man used his vision to change the world.

The Daily Telegraph praises Lewis’s biography as racy and rakish and lauds it for telling the story not just of a man, or even a firm, but also of a cultural makeover that shaped the world as we know it.

A former publisher and the deputy editor of the London Magazine from 1990 to 1994, Jeremy Lewis has written three volumes of autobiography and biographies of Cyril Connolly, Tobias Smollett and now Allen Lane.