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He was transparent, the way holograms in films are transparent.Three dimensional, definitely really there and fucking...transparent.
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Never run a game of Hide the Lady if you can’t remember where you’ve put the queen, because some people embrace forensic accounting as a blood sport.
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He was one of those people who constantly seems to be having a conversation with someone other than the person he’s actually talking to—presumably someone much more politically committed. And interested.
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For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.
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Carved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists?
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When it was my turn and I stood up and called for life, liberty and peace and managed to sit down before I added a hard-boiled egg to the list.
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She was staring at us over the top of a pair of completely pointless sunglasses and her phone was playing what I now recognised as The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X-Ray Specs.
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There’s more to life than just London,’ said Nightingale. ‘People keep saying that,’ I said. ‘But I’ve never actually seen any proof.
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MUCH AS I love the Jag, it’s too conspicuous for everyday police work. So that day I was driving a battered silver ex–Metropolitan Police Ford Asbo that, despite my best efforts, smelled vaguely of old stakeouts and wet dog.
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Like a lot of London, Richmond town centre had been laid out back when town planning was something that happened to other people.
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The designer had probably been going for Turkish Bath but had hit Czech Porn Shoot instead.
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The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse stuck in my mind because of the subject's flagrant health and safety violation. As any competent practitioner will tell you, you always complete your protective circle *before* you start your workings.
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I didn’t tell him that it was all stored as binary information on rapidly spinning shiny discs, partly because I’d have to look up the details myself, but mostly because by the time he’d understood the technology it would have been replaced by something else.
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Inside, it was very dark but I am, if not exactly a master, then definitely an apprentice in the secret arts. And as such I laugh in the face of darkness.
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MIU was still stuffed into their overheated office space. Luckily somebody had sprung for an industrial-sized cooling fan with a face the same diameter as a dustbin lid and an unfortunate tendency to blow any unsecured paperwork out the nearest window. If we’d had a green screen we could have shot the live elements to a low budget disaster movie.
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I was pleased to see that even back in the glory days of the Folly people left their mugs of tea on their magical textbooks.
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Dedication This book is dedicated to Sir Terry Pratchett OBE who has stood like a wossname upon the rocky shores of our imaginations – the better to guide us safely into harbour.
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NIGHTINGALE AND I did what all good coppers do when faced with a spare moment in the middle of the day—we went looking for a pub.
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I did feel a 'something', like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.
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The voice belonged to a plump, round-faced woman of the sort that develops a good personality because the alternative is suicide.
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Sir Isaac Newton legendarily wrote the famous Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which gave us principles that a couple of hundred years later were good enough to land a man on the moon. Then he wrote the slightly less well known Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis, which codified the magical techniques that allow me to inconvenience paper targets and Nightingale to demolish small agricultural buildings.
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The rules of English grammar are largely an artificial construct with little or no bearing on the language as it is spoke.
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I nodded absently as I made a note of the pub. The Rising Sun drinking establishment exists right on the fringes of the demi-monde – not being nearly as antique or mysterious as it pretends to be.
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Fuck me. We're living in Isengard.
Ben Aaronovitch