More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.
‘It’s “Body and Soul”,’ I said. ‘It’s from the 1930s.’ ‘Who played it?’ ‘Just about everybody. It’s one of the great jazz classics.’ ‘You can’t die of jazz,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Can you?’
Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists, but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it – at least, not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.
If anyone knew about untimely and unnatural deaths it was Polidori, who literally wrote the book on the subject just before drinking cyanide – it’s called An Investigation Into Unnatural Deaths in London in the Years 1768-1810 and it weighs over a kilogram – I just hoped that reading it didn’t drive me to suicide too.
The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.
the Benny Goodman Trio on shellac, with a Victor black and gold label.
It had the surprising heft of a 78, much heavier than an LP – anyone weaned exclusively on CDs probably wouldn’t have been able to lift it.
‘Science doesn’t have all the answers, you know.’ ‘It’s got all the best questions, though,’ I said.
It was one of those tragic relationships: I’m a junior policeman, she’s the goddess of a suburban river in south London – it was never going to work out.
You never claim to be a freelance or artistic anything, unless you want a personal credit rating lower than an Irish bank’s.
The police can live with looking corrupt, bullying or tyrannical, but looking stupid is intolerable.
Behind her I could hear a band playing “Red Clay”.
John Radcliffe, royal physician to William and Mary, was famous in his own time for reading very little and writing almost nothing. So it stands to reason that one of the most famous libraries in Oxford was his creation.
Over his shoulder I watched as a fit-looking white woman on the club’s small stage rotated her hips to Lounge Against the Machine’s cover of ‘Baby Got Back’.
‘I know it’s unfashionable,’ said James, after going on about Don Cherry for a while. ‘But I’ve always had a soft spot for the cornet.’
When they do go, they almost always head for Norfolk, where the skies are big, the land is flat and the demographics are full of creamy white goodness. It is, says my dad, the poor man’s alternative to Australia, now that South Africa has gone all multicultural.
A couple of glass-fronted bookcases filled with paperbacks: Penguins, Corgis and Panthers from the 1960s and 1970s – Len Deighton, Ian Fleming and Clive Cussler. It looked like the fiction section of a charity shop.
For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.
