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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A Victorian detective was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest.
'There is something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite for carrion,' wrote Mansel, 'this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty before the scent has evaporated.'
Children, he wrote elsewhere, were 'diamond editions of remote ancestors, full of savage whims and impulses'.
