Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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 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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When you arrive unexpectedly at someone’s house you go in through the front door, often after making sure you’ve got a couple of mates waiting round the back. For a business, especially the kind that involves big trucks and heavy metal, it’s always better to go in through the back. The customer-facing part of any modern business is purposely designed to be as politely unhelpful as possible. If you go in from the rear, the customer-facing staff are all facing the wrong way and everybody starts their conversation on the back foot.
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Pictures of Cheam adorn the walls of planning offices of every Home County to serve as an awful warning.
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THE METROPOLITAN Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations. Not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single possible lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught, or the senior investigating officer dies of old age. As a result, murder investigations are conducted not by quirky Detective Inspectors with drink/relationship/mental problems but a bunch of frighteningly ambitious Detective Constables in the first mad flush of their careers.
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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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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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Don’t get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features.
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At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wobble and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.
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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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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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Dr Walid walked me past the security at reception and introduced me to today's dead body.
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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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One of the first rules of police work is that trouble will always come looking for you, so there’s no point looking for it.
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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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The Fire Brigade recognise only two kinds of people at a fire, victims and obstacles, and if you don’t want to be either it’s best to stay back.
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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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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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NOBODY LIKES a riot except looters and journalists. The Metropolitan Police, being the go-ahead and dynamic modern police service that it is, has any number of contingency plans for dealing with civil disturbance. From farmers with truckloads of manure to suburban anarchists on a weekend break and Saturday jihadists. What I suspect they didn’t have plans for was just over two thousand enraged opera lovers pouring out of the Royal Opera House and going on a mad rampage through Covent Garden.
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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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People don't like to speak ill of the dead even when they're monsters, let alone when they're loved ones. People like to forget any bad things that someone did and why should they remember?
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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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CO19, the Met’s firearms unit, whose unofficial motto is, “Guns don’t kill people, we kill people with guns.
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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.