“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... and lyrics; he’d even written a couple of (unproduced) plays. Charles Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester, partly resentful of her husband’s evident fascination with his movie’s star, claimed that Mitchum was forever using ‘big, long words’ to impress Laughton. Yet at the same time he couldn’t stop himself from playing the vulgarian and ...”

“... signed by its sender and encrypted to its receiver’. The public key, or address, is matched, as John Lanchester handily described it in the LRB, to ‘a private key which provides access to that address’. A key is really just a string of numbers and digits: the public key demonstrates ownership of any given address; the private key can only be used ...”

“... tree at Stapledown: somewhere there still exists a glorious snapshot of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, who took it over, bursting happily out of one of its upper windows. And all this variety comes to a head, the whole place bursting out of embracing trees, at the estuary township of Portmeirion. Most often puffed off nowadays as ‘Italianate’ or ...”