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Keeping a secret always makes the police suspicious. And while we’re willing to believe in the possibility of a totally innocent explanation, we never think that’s the way to bet.

Dedication: This book is dedicated to all librarians everywhere—for they are the true keepers of the secret flame and not to be trifled with.

Now, I have - as Beverley says - views about architecture. But there's modern stuff I like. The Gherkin, the Lloyd's Building, even the Shard - despite the nagging feeling I get that Nazgûl should be roosting at the top. But the truth is that in the case of One Hyde Park my boy Sir Roger was definitely just putting in the hours for the pay check. It's not ugly as such...it's just not anything in particular.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park—it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

I considered lying for all of about two nano-seconds, but I don’t have a death wish—not even a figurative one. Of course, philosophically speaking, truth is a slippery concept and one should always be alive to nuance.

Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song.

I didn’t bother calling Nightingale on the mobile I’d got him for Christmas because he only turns it on when he wants to call someone—the new technology being strictly there for his convenience, not anybody else’s.

This was the Wyldewood, spelt with a Y, that once covered the Island of Britain and would again, once the pesky tool-using primates had done the decent thing and exterminated themselves.

“You know how some people work at being stupid?” she asked. “If you give them a clear, common sense choice they give it a lot of thought and then choose stupid.”

Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.

I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing.

Charing Cross Road was once the bookselling heart of London and disreputable enough to avoid the multinational chains in their unceasing quest to turn every street of every city into a clone of every other.