False Value (Rivers of London, #8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instincts of a moth in a candle factory.

I’d been boringly conventional and had a tuna and sweetcorn baguette from a machine adorned with a reproduction of Delacroix’s Liberty Being Too Busy Leading the People to Pull Her Dress Back Up

‘Tired people don’t do their jobs properly,’ he said, demonstrating one of the reasons why he’d left the police.

I believe in coincidence, coincidences happen all the time, but I don’t trust coincidences.

I can has magic spelz too.

You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.

‘These techbros have tunnel vision,’ said Stephen. ‘They’re so fucking busy with their dreams of the future they don’t stop to think about where they are or what the fuck they’re doing.’

Further advances in science have done little to help our understanding, except to add a growing temptation to attach the word ‘quantum’ to everything.

Because as Shakespeare said – Oh! How many operational contingency directives we receive. When first we practise to deceive.

‘He’s thinking of the Singularity,’ said Dennis. ‘It’s going to happen in 2029,’ said Princeton. ‘And then all this bullshit that you think is so important, you can kiss it all goodbye.’

‘We traced a payment from one Antem Sergeyevich Yershov, a mid-tier oligarch,’ said Silver. Mid-tier meaning that he was merely obscenely wealthy, rather than functionally an independent nation state in his own right.

The Folly had once had its very own school of witchcraft and wizardry – well, wizardry, because obviously women hadn’t been invented until 1945.

All man e pekin special to e mama ein e papa.

But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

I glanced back to where Brad was regaling Victor with his tales of growing up in Santa Cruz and catching waves at Steamer Lane. Victor was nodding happily in the manner of a man who was willing to listen to ever so much chat if he’s got a chance to get his leg over later.

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. Anonymous

I nearly said the six hundred and forty million in bearer bonds he was keeping in the same vault, but I didn’t trust either of them not to get the reference.

‘They are such knees as dreams are made of.’

steampunk Borg cube of steel and brass gears and ratchets.

Nobody has a favourite Tesco Express.

‘These billionaires always get what they want – in the end.’ Interesting, I thought – a little bit of class warfare. ‘Not always,’ I said as primly as I could. ‘Tell that to Jeffrey Epstein,’ she said, which meant nothing to me at the time.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Cautious is my middle name.’ ‘But your first name is Never Knowingly,’

Peter not only misquotes Sir Walter Scott: O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive! But to add insult to injury, misattributes the quote to Shakespeare. This is entirely the fault of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.