Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

“These people are not to be trusted,” I said.
“These people?”
“People with…” I looked over at the poshest person I’ve ever met and tried to think of the right word. “Entitlement,” I said. “They’re not good at keeping promises.

I could see the cartoon slot machine flicker behind his eyes. Nightingale was offering what the ridiculously rich always crave—a chance to be exclusive.

Nothing attracts the powerful quite like more power.

Lots of angled struts, planes of glass and random spikes. It was, as architectural theorists like to say, a bold statement and the statement was: “Fuck truth and beauty. We’ve got money and loads of it.”

Despite being the oldest part of London, the Square Mile has a faster architectural churn than anywhere else in the city. Occasionally it throws up something exciting, innovative and modern…but mostly it doesn’t. Architects like a bit of volume, and financiers like floor space. The easiest way to maximize both is to build a cube—which is why ninety-nine per cent of all office buildings are boxes with lobbies.

We headed off to do some community outreach. This involves meeting people, listening to their stories and memorizing their names and faces in case you have to come back and arrest them at a later date.

Anyone who’s taken statements from multiple witnesses to the same event will know how malleable memory is.

My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn’t exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms. I’m particularly proud of “initial incident” although “subjective perception threshold” runs a close second.

I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub.
Lulu gave me a crooked smile.
“High Fae?” She asked.
“You know,” I said. “The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.”
“You mean them what step between worlds?”
“Could be.”
“Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?”
“Them sort of people,” I said. “Yeah.”
“Not in here, squire,” she said. “I run a respectable pub.”

Few buildings evoke the sinister horror of 1950s municipal architecture more strikingly than the flat roofed pub. Thrown up in their thousands wherever the working class were being rehoused, it’s hard to imagine that the architects were not secret teetotallers looking to make the whole pub experience as grim as possible.

Most archaeology in London these days is rescue archaeology—projects designed to preserve as much as possible from the relentless cash-driven redevelopment. It’s not a new problem. Ask a medievalist about Victorian cellars or an Iron Age specialist about medieval ploughing—but take snacks, because you’re going to be there for a while.

This sort of thing is pretty common—people often draw more attention to themselves trying to hide their activities than whatever it was they were up to would. Plus sometimes the cover-up is more illegal than the thing they were covering up. Still, if people were brighter routine police work would be much harder.

“They’re all so ridiculously young,” said Nightingale.
“They” were mostly Police Staff, what we’re not supposed to call civilian workers any more—analysts and data entry specialists—who’d got the boot when the government decided that in the light of an increased security threat what London needed was a smaller police force.

Dedication: This book is dedicated to all the people whose job it is to rush into danger when everybody else is running in the other direction.

“Like when you kiss me,” she said. “Is it enjoyable because of the physical sensation or is it because you think it should be enjoyable?”
Good question, and we quickly developed experimental protocol which unfortunately left us too knackered to record our results properly and thus invalidated any conclusions. We have faith in the methodology, though, and continue to repeat the experiment on a regular basis.
And people say science is dull.