Belgravian sisters

It was being borne in on me that the moral climate of Abysinnia was not quite that of our own polite society — not that Uliba’s Belgravian sisters are averse to a cut off the joint from time to time, but they know enough to keep quiet about it.


Flashman on the March, p.86, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, joint.

Not exactly Eric Newby

      If you suppose, by the way, that I am unduly susceptible, you should read the recollections of J.A. St John, Esq., who travelled in Abyssinia in the 1840s and appears to have spent most of his time goggling at boobies, on which he was obviously an authority.


Flashman on the March, p.78, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



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Bone clean

. . . I was conducted to an airy chamber on the third floor, bone clean and well if sparsely furnished with a good charpoy,* leather chair, table, wash-stand, rug on the floor and leather curtain on the arrow-slit window — I’ve stayed in country inns at home that were less decent and comfortable.


* Native frame-and-cord bedstead.



Flashman on the March, p.77, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, leather.

Brazen preening and ogling

I’m not unused to female attention, as you know, but I don’t recall more brazen preening and ogling than I got from Uliba-Wark’s domestics. Plainly they were no strangers to the hayloft or long grass.


Flashman on the March, p.76, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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About to apply

. . . I was about to apply the Flashman half-nelson (buttoack in one hand, tit in t’other) when she drew her head back from mine . . .



Flashman on the March, p.70, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Delicious little balls

There was a curried pastry which Uliba-Wark divided among the four of us, and some delicious little balls like the bittebolle they serve n Holland, only these weren’t meat but, as I discovered on inquiry, powdered locusts bound with fat. It was too late by then, so I calmed my stomach with some of the liquor they call tej, which is a fermentation of honey and barley, guaranteed to put you under the table if you ain’t careful, but capital in moderation.


Flashman on the March, p.68, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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A Flashy brag

. . . now that Napier was asking if there was anything more he could do for me, I did what I’d done so often, and put on a Flashy brag, the bravado of despair, I guess it is, the fraudsters instinct for playing out the charade.
     “I’d be obliged for a revolver and fifty rounds, sir. Oh, and a box of cheroots, if you have one to spare.”


Flashman on the March, pp.64-5, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, bravado.

Struck me dumb

      The suddenness of it struck me dumb. I’d been slapped in the face before with commissions there was no avoiding, but always there had been a breathing space, of hours at least, in which to digest the thing, gather my scattered wits, fight down my dinner and wonder how to best shirk my duty. But here, after the barest instruction, this cool old bastard was launching me to damnation with barely time to change my shirt . . .


Flashman on the March, pp.61-2, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, wits.

Antique whiskers

. . . and then I remembered that this same Napier, with his antique whiskers and one foot in the grave, had recently married a spanking little filly of eighteen, which had plainly influenced his outlook on commerce with the fairer sex; no wonder he looked as though he’d been fed through a mangle.


Flashman on the March, p.58, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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A gift mare

. . . some fellows don’t know a gift mare when she kicks ’em in the trinkets.


Flashman on the March, p.56, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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He will surely do

      They were the kind of words you’d expect to hear from a Brooke or a Custer, spoken with a heroic flourish and a fist on a table. Napier said them with all the fervour of a man reading a railway time-table . . . but I thought, farewell and adieu, Brother Theodore, your goose is cooked; this quiet old buffer with the dreary whiskers may not shout the odds, but what he says he will surely do.


Flashman on the March, pp.53-4, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, words.

Inner Flashman

He paused again. “Shall I continue?”
       At this point, when it was plain that some beastly folly was about to be unveiled, Inner Flashman would gladly have cried: “Not unless you wish to risk seeing a grown man burst into tears and run wailing into the Abyssinian night!” Outer Flashman, poor devil, could only sit sweating nonchalantly, going red in the face with funk and hoping that Napier might construe it as apoplectic rage at the prospect of having my travel plans upset.


Flashman on the March, p.51, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, folly.

Elephant guns and theodolites

When he wasn’t being all heroic, chasing Sikhs with elephant guns and hammering Pathans on the border, he’d laid half the canals and most of the roads in northern India, from Lahore to the Khyber, and built Darjeeling.


Flashman on the March, p.49, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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The coolest fish

      If you’ve read Tom Brown you may remember a worthy called Crab Jones, of whom Hughes said that he was the coolest fish in Rugby, and if he were tumbled into the moon this minute he’d pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets. Bob Napier always reminded me of Crab, in the Sikh War, the Mutiny, China, and along the frontier: the same sure, unhurried style, the quiet voice, the methodical calm that drove his more excitable subordinates wild. He was also the best engineer in the army, and the most successful commander of troop I ever knew.

Flashman on the March, p.49, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, cool.

Beyond all doubt

And blessed if he wasn’t bright-eyed with memory. “Give me your hand, old comrade, and welcome indeed, for I never was so pleased to see anyone, I can tell you!”
     That was the moment when I knew, beyond all doubt, that the doom had come upon me yet again.



Flashman on the March, p.48, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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An expert to boot

      You see, we poltroons have a talent for spotting heroes — we have to, in order to steer well clear of them — and from what I learned from Henty, who sat by me at tiffin, Speedy was a prime specimen, and an expert to boot.


Flashman on the March, p.35, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, heroes.

Closer to seven feet than six

      Bar Mangas Colorado, he was the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life, closer to seven feet than six and built like an overgrown gorilla. his enormous body was wrapped in a robe made of lions’ manes which covered him from the white scarf round his neck to his massive half-boots, he wore a black beard to his chest, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a smoking-cap, and carried a throwing spear in one hand and a straw umbrella in the other. To complete this bespoke costume he had a sabre on his hip, a revolver in his belt, and a round native shield slung on his back. When he grinned with a fierce glitter of teeth in the beard, he looked like a Ghazi on hasheesh — and then he spoke, brisk and high-pitched, his huge hand gently enfolding mine, and he might have been a vicar welcoming me to the sale of work.
      “Charles Speedy, Sir Harry, used to be adjutant of the Tenth Punjabis, saw you once on the Grand Trunk, near Fatehpur, oh, ever so long ago, but you didn’t see me.”
      Then you must have been lying down in cover and wearing mufti, thinks I.


Flashman on the March, p.31, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, costume.

Complete with a fly-whisk

. . . he was a languid, amiable young haw-haw named Twentyman, a Hussar, complete with fly-whisk and followed by a chico* with a bucket of camphorated water whose duty it was to supply his master with wet clouts to sponge away the dust.


* Native Child


Flashman on the March, p.29, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



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A quartermaster’s nightmare

      It was a quartermaster’s nightmare, too much gear coming ashore too quickly and nowhere to put it, with confusion worse confounded by the milling mob of what someone called the “pierhead democracy” . . .


Flashman on the March, p.28, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



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Certain defeat

. . . for perhaps the first time in her long and turbulent history Britain was going into a war which everyone believed we were going to lose. Everyone, that is, except Bughunter Bob Napier.


Flashman on the March, p.27, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, war.