Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Most archaeology in London these days is rescue archaeology – projects designed to preserve as much as possible from the relentless cash-driven redevelopment. It’s not a new problem. Ask a medievalist about Victorian cellars or an Iron Age specialist about medieval ploughing – but take snacks, because you’re going to be there for a while.
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This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.
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The media are doing this, not because they have a sinister motive, but because they love to feel that they are influencing events. That's why they hate politicians so much, because politicians have direct power and they do not.
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Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.
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The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn't set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.
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I think you’re going to find Marcus Aurelius particularly useful.’ ‘For what?’ I asked. Nightingale hesitated. ‘Quoting, mainly,’ he said. ‘And thus maintaining an air of erudition and authority.
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It's a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.
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CO19, the Met’s firearms unit, whose unofficial motto is, “Guns don’t kill people, we kill people with guns.
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Sinister is Latin for 'left', making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education.
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I left in a hurry before he could change his mind, but I want to make it clear that at no point did I break into a skip.
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Now, personally, I'd have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we're the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn't have one.
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A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis, only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.
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The very rich, having fundamentally missed the point of urban living, have long been frustrated by the fact that it’s impossible to squeeze the amenities of a country mansion—car showroom, swimming pool, cinema, servants quarters etc.—into the floor space of your average London terrace. Those without access to trans-dimensional engineering, a key Time Lord discovery, have had to resort to extending their houses into the ground. Thus proving that all that stands between your average rich person and a career in Bond villainy is access to an extinct volcano.
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I wasn't sure I found that particularly reassuring, but in the event of an attack I wasn't going to be as much use as Thomas 'Oh sorry, was that your Tiger Tank?' Nightingale.
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Peter Grant. Recent arrival, slacker and man of very little fame.
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That which does not kill us has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.
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The rise and fall of Teresa Cornelys proves three things: that the wages of sin are high, that you should “just say no” to opera, and that it’s always wise to diversify your investment portfolio.
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I sighed and went back to my book, in which Morgoth nicked the eponymous jewels and had away with them back to Angbad. Sorry mate, I thought, not my jurisdiction. Did you have them insured? Whereupon Fëanor gets a crime number and a leaflet about being on guard against theft and the wiles of the personification of evil.
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Gaston was a short, bulky man in his late fifties who favoured tight jeans, studded belts and sleeveless T-shirts, the better to show off the tattoos on his own arms. Only the absence of a mullet or a purple Mohican saved him from a breach of the EU directive against egregious cliché embodiment.
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Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension.
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My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.
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My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It's the best piece of advice he has ever given me, and probably the reason I was born.
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When it’s still—when it’s the cellar of a house, or a ring of mushrooms in a forest or a gun emplacement outside Offenburg—it’s called one of two things. If it remains static and unchanging then we call it a despair. If it seeks to extend its influence then it is a malignancy. Or as the Director puts it—a despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you.
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Cicero wouldn’t approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.