Noel Kelly

“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.”
― Rory Clements, 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.”
― Robert Harris, The Fear Index

“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.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

“But really, why would one bother to imitate anything so vulnerable and unreliable, or with such built-in obsolescence: a central processing unit that could be utterly destroyed because some ancillary mechanical part – the heart, say, or the liver – suffered a temporary interruption? It was like losing a Cray supercomputer and all of its memory files because a plug needed changing.”
― Robert Harris, The Fear Index