Quotes from Ben Aaronovitch

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.

Always look after your people," he said as I noted down the order. "The way you treat them sets an example for the way they treat others.

I heard a woman scream with rage and frustration and then grunt like a tennis player.

Also a Friday night, which meant crowds of young people being horribly drunk and loud in two dozen languages.

At the bottom of the box I found part of a map that had been ripped down its centrefold – a 1:40,000 scale depiction of a place called Ootacamund, which turned out on later research to be a British Hill Station in Tamil Nadu. A Hill Station being a place where colonial administrators and the like could use altitude to avoid the oppressive Indian summer heat, since the sensible solution, i.e. abandoning colonialism and moving back to Surrey, obviously never occurred to them.

Cum te mai sim?i? a întrebat el. — Uman, am zis. — E suficient, a spus.

These days Big Brother, or more precisely, your Bratty Techno Uncle, doesn't need an army of paid informers to keep tabs on you. Everybody seems dead keen to take personal responsibility for their own surveillance. So the problem with trying to keep a low profile is that sooner or later you'll have an involuntary encounter with someone who's dying to share your details with the world.

M-am holbat la el. Nu credeam în fantome sau zâne sau zei, iar în ultimele câteva zile eram ca un om care privea la un spectacol de magie – m? a?teptam ca un magician s? p??easc? din spatele unei cortine ?i s? îmi cear? s? aleg o carte, oricare. Nu eram preg?tit s? cred în fantome, îns? asta e chestia cu experin?a empiric? – e realitatea.

which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built.

And this was all getting a bit steampunk for my liking. If Jacob Astor turned out to be wearing goggles it was going to go very hard on him indeed.

five story Georgian terrace whose elegant proportions would have caused the most hardened Canadian property developer's soul to weep to see such beauty—just prior to having the place gutted and filled with the latest in personality-free interior design.

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.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly, sucks to be you, quadruped.

S? p?strez pacea Reginei. S? aduc ordine în haos.

Vrei s? fii vr?jitor, a zis. — Nu ?tiu. — Mincinosule. Vrei s?-i fii ucenic ?i s? înve?i magia ?i s? c?l?re?ti pe o m?tur?. — Nu prea cred c? vr?jitorii adev?ra?i c?l?resc m?turi.

So into the woods we went—it was surprisingly noisy. Especially one loud bird whose chirping sounded far too cheerful for the middle of the night.

Even in these days of eBay and superencrypted anonymous purchasing over the Internet, the safest way to buy stolen stuff is to meet a total stranger and hand over a wedge of untraceable cash. They don't know you, you don't know them - the only problem is where to meet.

Are you expecting to meet a dragon?" I asked, and remembered Brook had mentioned them, too. Perhaps dragons were a Northern thing, like flat caps and an ingrained sense of grievance.

Now, personally, I'd have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we're the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn't have one.

Himmler's Ahnenerbe, an organization dedicated to providing both an intellectual framework for Nazism and Indiana Jones with an endless supply of disposable bad guys.

My father always swore that jazz, like the blues, was born in the muddy water of the Mississippi. My mother swore that it came from the bottle, like all the devil's best work.

Us police like our CCTV. It makes our job easier, and our only complaint about the surveillance state is that it's not nearly as seamless as everyone seems to think it is. Just ask anyone who's had to sit through five hundred hours of grainy video on the off-chance someone in a hoody looked the wrong way at the right moment.

people who would furnish their home with the bleak minimalist style of a Scandinavian detective novel.

Manchester University was an odd choice, though—posh kids that fail to reach Oxbridge generally go to Bristol, Edinburgh or, for the true walk of shame, Exeter.