Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Sited a third of the way up Dartmouth Park Hill, it had obviously been designed by a keen admirer of Albert Speer, particularly his later work on the monumental fortifications of the Atlantic Wall.
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He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.
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The bungalow was a hideous red-brick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracy Emin instead.
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I don’t know why Nightingale was so surprised—I barely knew four and a half spells and you couldn’t have got me to give it up, and that’s despite close brushes with death by vampire, hanging, malignant spirit, riot, tigerman, and the ever-present risk of overdoing the magic and getting a brain aneurysm.
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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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A romantic," said Nightingale much, much later. "The most dangerous people on Earth.
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A lifetime of disappointment had made him cynical, but you don’t stay an activist without a core of stubborn belief that things can get better – it’s a bit like being a Spurs supporter really.
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Then Beverley Brook stepped onto the footplate and pointed a shotgun straight at the Queen’s head – I recognised the Purdey from my trunk. It was nice to see it getting an airing. Beverley herself was wearing an oversized leather jerkin and jeans. Her dreads had been tied into a plait down her back and a pair of antique leather and brass goggles were pushed up onto her brow. ‘Put your hands on your head,’ she said, ‘and step away from the boyfriend.’ The Queen hissed and gripped the rope harder.
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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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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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My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard.
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Oh shit, I thought, if this isn’t the Low King of the Dwarves then I’m the President of the Cricklewood Branch of the Women’s Institute.
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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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Or at least of fending him off for long enough that we can sweep in heroically like the Seventh Cavalry.’ Burning tipis and shooting women and children, I thought.
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Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think—that’s what we want for our town.
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Kumar and I ended up stuffing tissue paper up our nostrils, but agreed that if we had to come down again more drastic action would be justified - like amputation.
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The word “bollocks” is one of the most beautiful and flexible in the English language. It can be used to express emotional states ranging from ecstatic surprise to weary resignation in the face of inevitable disaster.
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When the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity – even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It’s exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name.
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Blackstone's Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything.
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Even in the 1980s your average young archaeologist would have had difficulty raising capital for a house. I knew this because it’s one of the things archaeologists will tell you about, at length, at the slightest provocation.
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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.
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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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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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We seem to be sitting around waiting for the next fucking disaster, which went into the official log as - DCI Seawoll felt that our operational posture was too reactive.