Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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The house had probably cost a couple of million quid, with its two stories plus loft conversion, red brick, and detailing on the porch roof that hinted at Arts and Crafts without actually making it over the finishing line. It was at least mercifully free of pebble-dash and fake half-timbering. They’d retained the original sash windows but installed the venetian blinds that have replaced net curtains as the genteel response to sharing your neighborhood with other human beings.
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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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Then he smiled at me and for that moment, and just that moment, I forgave him everything—everything—because now I knew what joy looked like and I was part of it.
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Every male in the world thinks he's an excellent driver. Every copper who's ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves.
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He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.
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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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I did feel a 'something', like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.
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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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Any working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point—the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears.
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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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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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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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Richmond won on points, but only because one of them had a flask full of coffee.
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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 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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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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Ever since mankind stopped wandering around aimlessly and started cultivating its own food, society has been growing more complex. As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born.
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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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Fuck me. We're living in Isengard.
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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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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.