Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Guleed passed me the completed IIP on Caroline Linden-Limmer and pointed out a note which registered that she’d been granted a Gender Recognition Certificate when she was eighteen – changing her legal gender from male to female. ‘So . . .’ I started, but was cut off by the vast silence emanating from Stephanopoulos behind us. I looked over at Nightingale, who looked quizzically back, and decided to explain the implications later. Surprisingly, when I did, his reaction was outrage that somebody had to apply to a panel to determine what gender they were – he didn’t say it, but I got the strong impression that he felt such panels were intrinsically un-British. Like eugenics legislation, banning the burka and air conditioning.
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Somebody doesn't know they're not in Kansas anymore,' said Stephanopoulos.
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In some households you only have to turn up three times before you’re expected to make your own tea, draw up a chair in front of the telly and call the cat a bastard.
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The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't.
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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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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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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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My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard.
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But the first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.
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On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.
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A romantic," said Nightingale much, much later. "The most dangerous people on Earth.
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Peter Grant. Recent arrival, slacker and man of very little fame.
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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 laws of thermodynamics were very clear on the subject – all debts must be paid in full.
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He was a Parisian. You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.
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I heard a woman scream with rage and frustration and then grunt like a tennis player.
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He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.
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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 was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they're that strung out.
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The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.
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Most people react this way when I tell them about the Nazis. Would it be more or less comforting if we could attribute that particular part of our history to the supernatural?
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Dominic tooled up five minutes later in a ten-year-old Nissan pickup truck that had been painted a non-standard khaki, dipped in dried mud up to the wheel arches and then randomly smacked with a sledgehammer to give it that Somali Technical look. I found myself checking to see if there was a mount for a fifty-caliber machine gun in the back.
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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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He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.