“Without a doubt, it was a book for when the birds had flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one’s friends had no desire to venture in.”
― A Gentleman in Moscow
― A Gentleman in Moscow
“The fisherman-painter has the best of the bargain as far as the weather goes, for the weather that is too bright for the trout deluges his hills and his sea with floods of radiant colour; the rain that interrupts picture-making puts water into the rivers and the lochs and sends him hopefully forth with rod and creel; while on cold dull days, when there is neither purple on the hills nor fly on the river, he can join a friendly party in a cosy bar and exchange information about Cardinals and March Browns, and practise making intricate knots in gut.”
― Five Red Herrings
― Five Red Herrings
“Wetheridge said he had been chased all over the Club that morning by an infernal photographer fellow, and that one got no peace these days with all this confounded publicity. Wimsey said it was all done for advertisement, and that advertisement was the curse of the age. Look at the papers – nothing but advertisements from cover to cover. Wetheridge said that in his time, by gad, a respectable Club would have scorned advertisements, and that he could remember the time when newspapers were run by gentlemen for gentlemen. Wimsey said that nothing was what it had been; he thought it must be due to the War.”
― Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
― Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
“How then can we tell what is true, sir?’ Felsted demanded as he poured the tea. ‘By thinking,’ Wilde said. ‘And by challenging the books you read. By getting dusty in archives. By listening to the evidence of archaeologists and palaeontologists. By using your eyes and ears and brains. And most of all by doubting everything I tell you until you have proved it for yourself.”
― Corpus
― Corpus
“Pretty soon all the information in the world – every tiny scrap of knowledge that humans possess, every little thought we’ve ever had that’s been considered worth preserving over thousands of years – all of it will be available digitally. Every road on earth has been mapped. Every building photographed. Everywhere we humans go, whatever we buy, whatever websites we look at, we leave a digital trail as clear as slug-slime. And this data can be read, searched and analysed by computers and value extracted from it in ways we cannot even begin to conceive.”
― The Fear Index
― The Fear Index
Noel Kelly’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Noel Kelly’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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