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The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2) QUOTES

The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2) QUOTES

1 " one fewer personal world was about to be destroyed through the selfishness or inconstancy of another. That, at least, was cause for gratitude. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2)

2 " He read the krimis for pure entertainment; they amused him, sometimes to the point of open laughter, with their prolonged and sometimes absurd inaccuracy. None of them, he had noted, was written by an author with the slightest connection with crime, with the result that their portrayal of the life of detectives bore no relation, in Ulf’s view at least, to the reality faced by him and his fellow detectives. Every so often, of course, a real policeman, or possibly a criminal defence lawyer, set out to write a book dealing with crime. These books would usually be rich in detail and accurate enough, but also tended to be clumsily written: policemen and lawyers may be good at detecting criminals or defending them, but that did not make them masters of prose. These were and then books, as Ulf termed them: books in which the construction and then was used with breathless enthusiasm. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2)

3 " A book on wind energy, Our Invisible Future, sat on a small pedestal, next to several titles on climate change. This book must be read by all those who use electricity, pronounced a handwritten placard below the book. Ulf raised an eyebrow. He used electricity, and was well disposed towards green energy, but did everyone have to read this? "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2)

4 " Memos descended fairly regularly from the Commissioner’s office, and they usually concealed an agenda. “Restructuring” was a current buzzword, having replaced “efficiency” and “skills development,” terms that had been the subject of the last two reports that the Department of Sensitive Crimes had been requested to submit. Each of these reports had taken two months to write and had disappeared into the maw of the police department without any sign of ever having been read by anybody. That was almost always the case with departmental reports, Ulf thought: People wrote them and submitted them. They then sat unread on several high-level desks before they were removed for filing. So it was, he suspected, throughout bureaucracies everywhere: people filled in forms and wrote reports that were rarely scrutinised and almost never led to anything happening in the real world. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2)

5 " Use the last report,” Anna suggested. “Simply delete ‘efficiency’ or whatever and insert ‘restructuring.’ That will save you a great deal of time.” Ulf acknowledged the wisdom of this advice. “Restructuring” would go away, just as “efficiency” and “skills development” had gone away. But hoops had to be jumped through in order for this to happen, and Ulf would have to do that. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2)

6 " He had been looking in quite the wrong place-a place of darkness-when he should have been looking in a place of light. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2)

7 " The afternoon was given over to sport, or to the appreciation of sport, as Ulf watched two football matches on the television, one after the other. They were scrappy and inconclusive games, marred by several ill-natured arguments with the referee. That always irritated Ulf, who felt that referees should be granted powers of arrest. If the police were waiting on the lines, and offenders could be seized and marched off to the cells, then there would be none of this bad behaviour, thought Ulf. As it was, these overpaid and over-indulged sportsmen could play to the gallery, parading their egos in displays of arrogance and petulance that held up the game unnecessarily. And as for those who deliberately sought to prolong a match for strategic reasons by feigning injury, they would soon abandon that if referees were allowed to count them out on the ground, just as the umpires of boxing matches could do. They would not have to count up to ten, thought Ulf: three would probably be enough to restore these sham casualties to rude health. "

― Alexander McCall Smith , The Talented Mr. Varg (Detective Varg, #2)