Цитаты из книги Broken Homes

If you've ever done clean-up at Glastonbury then nothing short of highgrade nuclear waste will ever scare you again.

You really haven't seen aggro until you piss off a working-class community in south London. They fought the plans for years until finally they wore down the developers through a combination of organised protest, savvy media skills and cockney rhyming slang.

You don’t get to be a senior investigating officer unless you have a degree in scepticism, an MA in distrust and your CV lists suspicious bastard under your hobbies.

In the old days I expect it was all right to chant in Latin and wave your hands about but your modern, up-to-date, image-conscious magical practitioner likes to be a little bit more discreet. These days we mutter them under our breath which makes us look like nutters instead. Lesley wears a Bluetooth earpiece and pretends to be talking Italian, but Nightingale doesn’t approve – it’s a generational thing.

Where, buoyed no doubt by the rising tide of German nationalism,’ said Postmartin, ‘it became the Deutsche Akademie der Höheren Einsichten zu Weimar or the Weimarer Akademie der Höheren Einsichten for short.’‘Because that is much shorter,’ I said.

When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.

Varvara Sidorovna’s face appeared above and looked down at me. When she saw me, she sighed and muttered something under her breath in Russian. Then she walked out of my view, her muttering getting louder until she was swearing noisily. I was struck by what a good language Russian was for swearing in —very expressive.

with my trusty native guide by my side, I started up the Asbo and set course for the dark heart of Essex

'How will you know if we need reinforcing?' she asked. 'I think you'll find I am perfectly capable of using a radio,' said Nightingale. 'And if that fails, I'm sure Peter here can be relied on to blow something up.'

'You know,' said Zach, 'until you came along I used to be the local loose cannon. Now people have started warning me about the dangers of associating with you.'

A quiet crowd is a bit of a worry to a copper, since a noisy crowd is one that's telegraphing what it's going to do next. A quiet crowd means that peple are watching and thinking. And that's always dangerous, on the off chance that what they're thinking is, I wonder what would happen if I lobbed this half brick at that particularly handsome young police officer over there.

I made the ususal squirmy excuses and promises of the fully grown man faced with his mum's uncanny ability to knock ten years off his age at will.

When in doubt, make it somebody else's problem.

another problem with the so-called surveillance state is that it mostly works office hours

We broke for what me and Lesley called dinner, Nightingale called supper and Molly, we'd begun to suspect, thought of as a field trials for her culinary experimentation.

German really is a splendid language for discussing the esoteric

Nightingale made an impressed murmur at the ease and speed at which the "film" could be manipulated. "Or is it called tape?" he asked. I didn't tell him that it was all stored as binary information on rapidly spinning shiny discs, partly because I'd have to look up the details myself, but mostly because by the time he'd understood the technology it would have been replaced by something else.

... the formae somehow represented the interaction between our electrochemically powered nervous system and the magical – field? Subspace dimensional manifold? Banana flavoured milkshake? ...