‘For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs,’ Peter Mandelson writes in The Third Man. ‘People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments.’ This clear and succinct expression of the idea that emotion is the true currency of democratic politics stood out on the page, and I moved to underline it, only to realise someone had done so already. Oddly, the book was spit new. It wasn’t even on paper. It was an ebook, a digital form of Mandelson’s masterwork that I’d downloaded from Amazon via the Kindle app on my iPad in the hope (futile, as it happened) of gleaning information about an obscure moment in recent British history. How could someone have been there before me? Each copy of each ebook, stored as bits of electronic data, is always new, the pages as white and the text as crisp as the day they were generated. I’d never looked at that page before. Yet there, under Mandelson’s bleak words, was a faint, dotted grey line. I touched the passage with my fingertip, and the explanation appeared in a pale blue balloon: ‘Eight other people highlighted this part of the book.’

LRB 3 November 2011 | PDF Download