Home > Work > Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)
101 " street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, "
― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)
102 " It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning. "
103 " He was from Yorkshire or somewhere like that and, like many Northerners with issues, he’d moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy. "
104 " A London copper doesn’t like to intrude upon a traveler camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear—it’s considered disrespectful otherwise. "
105 " the waiting areas maintained the unique combination of cramped busyness and barren inhumanity that was the glory of British architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. "
106 " She had the startled rabbit look that civilians get after five minutes of helping the police with their inquiries. If they stay calm for too long, it’s a sign that they’re professional villains, or foreign or just plain stupid. "
107 " Nightingale had the lamb in wild lemon and I made do with a chicken Madras hot enough to make Nightingale’s eyes water. It was a little on the mild side for me. Indian cooking has no terrors for a boy raised on groundnut chicken and jollof rice. The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn’t set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper. Actually there’s no such motto – from my mum’s point of view it was simply inconceivable that anybody would want to eat anything that didn’t burn the inside of your mouth out. "
108 " Every copper knows that the funfairs of Great Britain are run by the Showmen, a collection of interwoven families so clannish they officially constitute a separate ethnic group of their own. Their family names were painted on the generator trucks and blazoned across the tops of hoardings. "
109 " I released the fireball and there was a muffled thump from behind the target. A wisp of smoke curled up towards the ceiling. Behind me Molly sniggered. We did an hour of practice, at the end of which I was capable of flinging a fireball down the range at the dizzying speed of a bumblebee who’d met his pollen quota and was taking a moment to enjoy the view. "
110 " Equipment for ghost hunters: thermal underwear, very important; warm coat; thermos flask; patience; ghost. "
111 " 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. "
112 " I slumped down in the easy chair. ‘You’ve been dead for two hundred years, Henry,’ I said. ‘I’m fairly certain you can’t murder someone who’s already dead.’ If you could, I thought, the Met would have a form for it. "
113 " Despite what you think you know, most people don’t want to fight, especially when evenly matched. A mob will tear an individual to pieces and a man with a gun and a noble cause is happy to kill ever so many women and children, but risking a fair fight—not so easy. That’s why you see those pissed young men doing the dance of “don’t hold me back” while desperately hoping someone likes them enough to hold them back. "
114 " Polidori had quite a lot to say about the dangers of breaking the pentagram when summoning a spirit. Having your soul dragged out and sent screaming down to hell was only the start of it. At each cardinal point of the pentagram I put one of my calculators. "
115 " Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;God said “Let Newton be” and all was light. "
116 " The flats were solidly built, so at least I didn’t grow up listening to next door’s live docusoap, but they were built on the dubious assumption, so beloved of postwar planners, that the London working class was composed entirely of hobbits. "
117 " Sifu? "
118 " If you’ve witnessed something,’ I said, ‘perhaps you’d better come and give a statement.’ ‘That would be a bit of problem,’ said Nicholas, ‘seeing as I’m dead.’ I thought I hadn’t heard him correctly. ‘If you’re worried about your safety …’ ‘I ain’t worried about anything any more, squire,’ said Nicholas. ‘On account of having been dead these last hundred and twenty years. "
119 " Also a Friday night, which meant crowds of young people being horribly drunk and loud in two dozen languages. "
120 " — Cum te mai simți? a întrebat el.— Uman, am zis.— E suficient, a spus. "