Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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.
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Under the vaulted arch of its white iron-and-glass roof it was as if IKEA had been hired to refit St. Pancras station. If Thomas the Tank Engine had been Swedish, his living room would have looked just the same.
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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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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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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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The mark was from the glue that once held a folder into which a library card would have fitted back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and computers were the size of washing machines.
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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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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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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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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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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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In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.
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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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Don’t get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features.
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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 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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The laws of thermodynamics were very clear on the subject – all debts must be paid in full.
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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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I happened to know for a fact that the whole of Belgravia nick were running a pool on how long I would last and how I would go—the options being death, medical discharge (physical), medical discharge (psychological), indefinite disciplinary suspension, sacked for misconduct, secondment to Interpol and, with just one vote, ascension to a higher plane of existence. I suspected the last one was a bit unlikely.
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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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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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Cicero wouldn’t approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.