Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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 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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Back at the start of World War Two the authorities forbade the use of the Underground as an air raid shelter. Instead Londoners were supposed to rely on hastily built neighborhood shelters or on the famous Anderson shelters, which were basically rabbit hutches made from corrugated iron with some earth shoveled on top. Londoners being Londoners, the prohibition on using the Underground lasted right up until the first air raid warning, at which point the poorly educated but far from stupid populace of the capital did a quick back-of-the-envelope comparison between the stopping power of ten meters of earth and concrete and a few centimeters of compost, and moved underground en masse. The authorities were appalled. They tried exhortation, persuasion, and the outright use of force, but the Londoners wouldn’t budge. In fact, they started to organize their own bedding and refreshment services.
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You do magic by learning formae which are like shapes in your mind that have an effect on the physical universe.
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One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and document scanner.
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We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are.
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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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But as the wise man said, life’s too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.
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I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: "Fuck me he's a earthbender.”
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He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him - that's the London way.
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The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.
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This book is dedicated to all the people who get up and do something about it, whatever “it” is and however small the thing it is they do.
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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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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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It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Walid as ‘mostly flat’.
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Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
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That’s because they don’t know. It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
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The rest of the band faded down to almost nothing while my dad did his best Bill Evans impression — except hopefully without the untreated hepatitis.
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The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.
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She was slender and dressed like an Edwardian maid, complete with a starched white bib apron over a full black skirt and white cotton blouse. Her face didn’t fit her outfit, being too long and sharp-boned, with black almond-shaped eyes. Despite her mob cap she wore her hair loose, a black curtain that fell to her waist. She instantly gave me the creeps and not just because I’ve seen too many Japanese horror films.
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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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It’s a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine, but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn’t a truism because most policemen think the word ‘empirical’ is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be.
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The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit.
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There are people who have been touched by, let’s call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they’re no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that’s a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word “barbarian” or the Daily Mail uses “Europe.”