Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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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Because who is more oppressed. Those that seek nothing but entitlements for themselves or those that claim for everything, social security, housing benefit, disability and pay for nothing.
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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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As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn’t it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain — they absolutely weren’t going to sparkle in the sunlight.
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The principal advantages of living in your station’s section house is that it is cheap, close to work and it’s not your parents’ flat. The disadvantages are that you’re sharing your accommodation with people too weakly socialised to live with normal human beings, and who habitually wear heavy boots. The weak socialisation makes opening the fridge an exciting adventure in microbiology, and the boots mean that every shift change sounds like an avalanche.
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I turned right onto the A410 which went north with suspiciously Roman straightness toward Aymestrey, which is less a village than a diorama of the last six hundred years of English vernacular architecture stretched along either side of the road.
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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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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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Lesley said that my exes knew that past a certain point I’d lost interest, and that’s why they always packed me in first. That’s not the way I remember it, but Lesley swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya – counting down to disaster. Lesley could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.
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We did a joint evaluation of video evidence encompassing all possible access points in conjunction with BTP and CLP, and despite widening the parameters of our assessment to include registered and nonregistered cameras in the high probability zones, we have as yet to achieve a positive identification of James Gallagher prior to his appearance at Baker Street” becomes: “We’ve checked every CCTV camera in the system and it’s as if the fucker beamed down from the Starship Enterprise.
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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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A London copper doesn't like to intrude upon a traveller camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear - it's considered disrespectful otherwise.
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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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Never diss somebody’s mum, never play chess with the Kurdish mafia, and never lie down with a woman who’s more magical than you are.
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You don’t get to be a senior investigating officer unless you have a degree in scepticism, an MA in distrust and your CV lists suspicious bastard under your hobbies.
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So, actions were still being actioned and me and Guleed were actioning them, and the wheels of justice ground on. Albeit in first gear.
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MY DAD says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube, and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become Londoners. He said there were others, some of whom were born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who spend their whole life dreaming of an escape. When they do go, they almost always head for Norfolk where the skies are big, the land is flat, and the demographics are full of creamy-white goodness.
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I listened to make sure she wasn’t coming up the stairs and had a poke through the underwear drawers but got nothing except a vague sense of being really unprofessional.
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It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, Street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden. Martin, who was none too sober himself, at first thought the body was that of one of the many celebrants who had chosen the Piazza as a convenient outdoor toilet and dormitory. Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body the "London once-over" - a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy or a human being in distress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport - like BASE jumping or crocodile wrestling. Martin, noting the good quality coat and shoes, had just pegged the body as a drunk when he noticed that it was in fact missing its head.
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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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But I wasn't some terrified peasant, I was an apprentice and I had been trained by the man who led the reguard at Ettersberg.
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Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.
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What's the biggest thing you've zapped with a fireball?' I asked. 'That would be a tiger,'said Nightingale. 'Well don't tell Greenpeace,' I said. 'They're an endagered species.' 'Not that sort of tiger,' said Nightingale. 'A Panzer-kampfwagen sechs Ausf E.' I stared at him. 'You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?' 'Actually I knocked out two,' said Nightingale. 'I have to admit that the first one took three shots, one to disable the tracks, one through the driver's eye slot and one down the commander's hatch - brewed up rather nicely.
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Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do “paperwork” and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.