Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London US Book 2)

by Ben Aaronovitch

She had the kind of precision-tooled middle-class accent that only comes from being taught English as a second language in the cradle.

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. The Radcliffe Science Library is housed in a circular domed building that looks like St Paul’s with the extraneous religious bits cut off.

There was a single institutional desk with a top bare save for what looked like the product of a loveless marriage between an early Mac and an IBM PC.

I got the distinct impression that this was aggressive chintz, warrior chintz, the kind of chintz that had gone out to conquer an Empire and still had the good taste to dress for dinner. Any Ikea flat-pack that showed its face round here was going to be kindling.