325 Quotes by Ben Aaronovitch

NIGHTINGALE AND I did what all good coppers do when faced with a spare moment in the middle of the day – we went looking for a pub.

Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song. This.

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.

I walked away with the cheerful step of a police officer who’s just made a tricky ethical question somebody else’s problem.

It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.

Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.

Vikings,” said Lesley. “Precisely,” said Nightingale. “Bloodthirsty, but surprisingly erudite in a limited fashion.” Well.

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.

He asked if we were really ghost hunting, and I said we were. “What, like officially?” “Officially secret,” I said because discretion is supposed to be, if not our middle name, at least a nickname we occasionally answer to when we remember.