Terry's household nursery rhyme book must strike a balance between these two versions. The rhyme is said to be about the mob of Dutchmen that William of Orange brought over with him to England in 1688, with the "one in a velvet gown" being the Prince himself. It has also bee said to be a reference to Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, forcing monks to beg on the streets for a living.

An Assassin tells Vimes "Your uniform doesn't scare me". Vimes agrees that it's not a scary uniform, and calls over Carrot and Detritus. "Now these, I think you'll agree, are scary uniforms." There's a similar exchange in Police Academy III between Mahoney and a cabbie, where he calls over Hightower for the same effect. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. From the Latin "Intro Ducere": Carrot points out that, as a policeman — from polis, city — he’s a man of the city. Later, Vetinari points out "politician" comes from the same root. But what it's got includes Corporal Carrot (technically a dwarf), Lance-constable Cuddy (really a dwarf), Lance-constable Detritus (a troll), Lance-constable Angua (a woman ... most of the time) and Corporal Nobbs (disqualified from the human race for shoving). And someone armed and dangerous has been getting ideas about power and destiny and lost kings, committing a string of seemingly random murders across the city.

Like all of Terry Pratchett's books, "Men at Arms" is an absolute delight. It is the sort of book that makes you happy. Read it. You're going to love. Just don't listen to this version of the audiobook. The performance is truly unbearable. It is as if the readers do not know the characters. This is book 15 in the Discworld series. By this time the characters are very well established and there is no way in the Discworld that they sound as these readers (I don't want to call them performers, sorry) make them sound. Vetinari for instance is notably tall, thin and smart as a whip. He is described as a predatory flamingo (haha!), but to hear him speak in this audiobook you would think he's a huge, slow, barrel-chested guy, And Death! Anyone who knows anything about Death, knows that he SPEAKS IN A VOICE LIKE THE SLAMMING OF COFFIN LIDS. (Not yelling at you! Death always speaks in all caps =) But in this book Death speaks in a low, raspy voice. No. No. I just couldn't bear it, I couldn't. I tried, I promise you I did, because it's Terry Pratchett and I love absolutely all of his books, but I couldn't. Preceded by Lords and Ladies, followed by Soul Music. Preceded in the Watch series by Guards! Guards!, followed by Feet of Clay. Colon: Forward, Lance-Constable Angua. Tell me, Lance-Constable, do you think you could kill a man? The dogs are shown to be able to discuss with each other on relatively complex subjects (though this could be interpreted as Translation Convention) and have a lot of human-like behaviours, such as raptly listening to their leader giving speeches on the superiority of the Canine Race. In Moving Pictures it was a plot point that normal, non-magically enhanced dogs were mostly concerned with eating, sleeping, and mating, while Witches Abroad showed that the results of forcing human thoughts on a wolf was not pretty.

So… we gotta talk about gun control and the relative ease and thoughtlessness with which modern weaponry allows us to kill each other. Fantasy Gun Control: Analysed. Vimes muses that gonnes would change the world because, instead of simply storing the power of your own muscles like crossbows, they 'give you power from outside' - the comparison to magic is obvious, and just as wizards try to restrict the availability of magic, assassins hate the gonne as it would make killing so easy. So there are forces actively keeping gonnes from becoming available. One of which is the Gonne itself, which wants to be THE Gonne. It murders the dwarf who fixed it so he couldn't make more of them. The Patrician’s smile remained, but his face seemed to pull away from it, leaving it stranded and all alone in the world.

Preview Book

Cool Sword: Carrot's nameless blade, which is very specifically and completely non-magical. It's just "bloody efficient" at cutting things, which is more than most Discworld swords, the vast majority of which are magical and thus don't quite exist. In contrast, Carrot's blade is very definitely a sword; the platonic ideal of sword. You can't doubt its existence while you're looking at it. Probably one of the most extreme ever written. There's a brief aside near the beginning of the book where Vimes and Carrot look at the disused Post Office building and its sign reading "NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOM OF NIT..." (a parody of the motto on the US Postal Service building in New York). In its place, this seems to be just a typical joke about bad mediaeval spelling on the Discworld, but a full eleven years later, Terry Pratchett wrote Going Postal, in which it's revealed that the sign is spelled like that because several letters were stolen to make up the sign of a nearby hairdresser's called Hugos (no apostrophe). In the Discworld series of novels by Terry Pratchett, Sam Vimes is the cynical but likable captain of the City Watch of the fictional city-state of Ankh-Morpork. [1] [2] In the 1993 novel Men at Arms, the second novel focusing on the City Watch through Vimes' perspective, Pratchett introduces the "Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness" through Vimes musing on how expensive it is to be poor: [2] [3] Vetinari seems to be considerably off his game throughout this story. Whether he actually is or not is never directly specified, though tantalising inferences can be made by reading Feet of Clay.

Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.” Sam Vimes is set to leave the Watch after his impending nuptials to Lady Sybil Ramkin, the noblest and richest woman in Ankh-Morpork ( “The Ramkins were more highly bred than a hilltop bakery, whereas Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving.”). All while the Watch expands and diversifies - now they employ a troll, a dwarf, and a w- .... ummm, let’s just say a woman - while a string of suspicious murders with a strange new weapon eventually known as a gonne occur - and ethnic tensions between dwarfs and trolls intensify, including in the Watch, and someone needs to sort it all out. A less filthy but recognizable example: in the middle of Edward d'Eath's slides is an upside-down picture of a vase of delphiniums. The Reveal: Edward d'Eath died early in the book and Dr. Cruces is the one who has been committing the murders. Disappointing Heritage Reveal: Big Fido the poodle is a canine supremacist who praises the ideal of wolves over civilized dogs. While he never finds out about the real thing, Angua's narration makes it clear he would suffer from this, as real wolves are nowhere near as big or strong as Fido makes them out to be and don't match his highly romanticized concept of the Noble Wolf. While discussing the merits of kings, Colon and Nobby chat about how if you make yourself useful to a king, he makes you a Knight. At the end of the book, Vetinari knights Vimes at Carrot's "request".Pratchett's stories are almost always "good to great", but he really shines with his character dialogue. There is a whole host of new characters added to the main cast in this book, and they are wonderful additions that play off each other so, so well. The watch has to recruit more members as part of an affirmative action initiative, so they bring in a dwarf, a troll, and a werewolf. But one of the main characters doesn't know the werewolf is a werewolf and thinks they have been recruited due to being a female. Bjorn, the dwarf who believes in reincarnation. Meaning he'll be Bjorn-again. Made more hilarious the fact that the one making the comment is Death, and he's saying it to a race that generally doesn't understand figures of speech, puns, etc. And Death himself, generally completely unable to get even the simplest of humor and wordplay, is immensely proud of having come up with "Bjorn-again" all by himself. Drunk with Power: Detritus, a little too high on the thrill of deputizing trolls, tells a freshly deputized dwarf to shut up. In front of a crowd of angry dwarfs. Fortunately, Carrot is able to stop things getting violent. She’s got to marry someone once she’s turned up. Can’t have unmarried brides flapping around the place, being a danger to society.”