Quotes from Ben Aaronovitch

her hair was piled up under a broad-brimmed

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.

I was just looking to ascertain the whereabouts of the proprietor when I stumbled across the Class A controlled substances that were in plain sight in the bottom drawer of a locked desk in an upstairs office, m'lord." Leave the police alone in a room for five minutes and we start looking in drawers, locked or otherwise. It's a terrible habit.

Amersham is well out of our manor, being in the County of Buckinghamshire and thus subject to the cool and professional attentions of the TVP, who are never referred to by their colleagues in the Met as the Chav Valley Police. So as we rode the train back up the line I called ahead and let them know we would be poking about, in full uniform, around their patch. They didn't seem bothered, but they did want a firm commitment that we'd warn them before doing anything drastic

Equipment for ghost hunters: thermal underwear, very important; warm coat; thermos flask; patience; ghost.

there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you're making it up as you go along.

although of course at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation, lunchtime was an illusion.

young woman of negotiable affection

She was staring at us over the top of a pair of completely pointless sunglasses and her phone was playing what I now recognised as The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X-Ray Specs.

Speak, friend, and enter,

Ah, yes, librarianship,' said Ms Winstanley. 'It's not for the faint hearted.

proudly part of the Enlightenment. God, if he existed, was the ultimate master craftsman who had set the world in motion, with fixed immutable laws, and then left it to get on with things. They saw angels and devils as abstract concepts and held that anything wandering around with a halo, wings, or a pitchfork was either an uppity fae, a con man, or a mountebank.

The original house had been replaced by an indoor flower market with an arched iron and glass roof. Eliza Doolittle, as played by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, would have bought her violets there before moving off to display the worst cockney accent this side of Dick Van Dyke.

But London didn't care, she never does when you leave her because she knows for every one that leaves another two arrive. Besides, she was too busy painting on her neon lipstick and dolling herself up in red and gold.

Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn't it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain – they absolutely weren't going to sparkle in the sunlight.

But I wasn't some terrified peasant, I was an apprentice and I had been trained by the man who led the reguard at Ettersberg.

We should tell forensics that the murder weapon may be archaeological," I said. "Archaeological?" asked Seawoll. "Could be," I said. "Is that your professional opinion?" "Yes.

We didn't bother to handcuff him, which surprised Agent Reynolds. Kittredge told her it was Metropolitan Police policy to avoid handcuffing suspects unless physical restraint is necessary—thus avoiding the risk of chafing, positional asphyxiation, and injury sustained by falling over your own feet and smacking your face into the pavement.

Classic grooming behavior, Dr. Walid told me later, something our fellow primates indulge in to maintain troop cohesion. Dr. Walid said human beings use language for the same purpose—which is why you find yourself talking total bollocks to people you meet at a bus stop and then wonder what the fuck did I do that for? As

But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

No," said the fox. "But the bag of cheese puffs she's carrying might be." "Hahaha," I said. "Boom bloody boom." "On Earth as it is on television," said the fox, and ducked out of sight.

Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism's DNA—hanging about like an actor's understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and—hey presto—suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a meter of cold steel through the chest. Perhaps

You know," he said, "when I first saw you I thought you were with the Thames girls, or a new sort of fae or something really outlandish like a witch doctor or an American.

we might have been Welsh, in my dad's eyes a fate worse than Scottish.