“The media are doing this, not because they have a sinister motive, but because they love to feel that they are influencing events. That’s why they hate politicians so much, because politicians have direct power and they do not.”

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.

Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

A physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.

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.

Every male in the world thinks he’s an excellent driver. Every copper who’s ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves.

The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.

This is your brain on magic.

If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet.

My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It’s the best piece of advice he has ever given me, and probably the reason I was born.

I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police “first greeting”. “Oi!” I said “What do you think you’re doing?

Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale – to the Jag mobile.

The worst part is staying in the room after you’ve broken the news, so that you’re forced to be there when someone’s life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn’t bother them – such people are not to be trusted.

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.

And once they start to think about the consequences, they almost always calm down. Unless they’re drunk, of course. Or stoned. Or aged between fourteen and twenty-one. Or Glaswegian.

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

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

Our past is not, as some fear, a series of events carved in stone that we must carry around for the rest of our lives… but a kaleidoscope of experiences that, when viewed through different lenses, can ‘color’ (change) how we see our present and future.

I’ve been producing documentaries on global warming for 20 years and have seen the early warnings of extreme weather events come true.

It’s in the nature of television to restrain the spontaneity of a live event. Things become more and more prepackaged.

We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That’s why events are always reinterpreted when values change.

Dread not events unknown, and be not downhearted, for the fountain of the water of life is involved in obscurity.

Events in a single human lifetime are remarkable. Events from all human lifetimes are inconceivable.

In security analysis the prime stress is laid upon protection against untoward events. We obtain this protection by insisting upon margins of safety, or values well in excess of the price paid.