He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn’t know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name.

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated — that’s the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don’t get a lot of practical experience.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs – don’t leave home without them.

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...

The world was different before the war,’ he said. ‘We didn’t have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place – we still dreamed of secret...

As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a...

Can you sacrifice people?’ I asked. ‘Take their magic that way?”Yes,’ he said. ‘But there’s a catch.”What’s the catch?”You get hunted down even unto the ends of the Earth and summarily executed.

The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves...

Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.

I didn’t think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.

I did feel a ‘something’, like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.

My mum translated this in her head to “witchfinder,” which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.

It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.

Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I’m considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, “Who knows why the fuck anything happens?

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there’s someone else to do the housework.

The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.

The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all...

First law of gossip – there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it.

Most people don’t see half of what’s in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the...

Despite what you think you know, most people don’t want to fight, especially when evenly matched. … That’s why you see those pissed young men doing the dance of “don’t hold me back” while desperately...

He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale – to the Jag mobile.

I looked into the literature on this,” said Nightingale, “and it wasn’t very helpful.””There’s a literature about this?””You’d be amazed, Constable, about what there’s a literature on.

The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop

On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.

This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I’ve never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation...

…don’t ask me why I know what an Edwardian smoking jacket looks like: let’s just say it has something to do with Doctor Who and leave it at that.

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.

He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you’re making it up as you go along.