People he loves

     ‘Although he is quite a dreadful person, really. He is absolutely selfish and dishonest and quite shameless. He has a shocking reputation — and deserves it. Just a few years ago he had to leave Sandringham in disgrace. ‘ She had apparently forgotten that Mr Franklin had been there. ‘How Aunt Elspeth has endured him . . . do you know that next year they will have been married for seventy-five years? It seems incredible . . . she is ninety years old, and a darling. So is he, I suppose — and yet sometimes I feel that I hate him more than anyone I’ve ever known; you would not beleve how mean and deceitful he can be — even with people he loves.’


Mr American, p.433, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, hate.

Stinging at the memory

It reminded me of the Madagascar forest, and you mayn’t believe it but I felt my eyes stinging at the memory of Elspeth blue-eyed and beautiful, smiling up at me with her golden hair tumbled about her head on the grass, her arms reaching up to me and those lovely lips parting . . . “My jo, my ain dear jo!”


Flashman on the March, p.135, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, memory.

Oyez, oyez, oyez!

      Unfortunately, she shared another characteristic with Elspeth — she had no more discretion than the town crier . . .


Flashman on the March, p.8, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, share.

Rolling in the deep

Very discreet, mind; a ship’s a small place, and chaste young ladies tend to be excitable the first few times and need to be hushed. Elspeth and my second wife, Duchess Irma, were like ecstatic banshees, I remember.


Flashman on the March, p.8, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, ecstatic.

Lady Flashman's burden

. . . being Scotch herself, and fancying that she occupied a place in Society, she was forever burdening other unfortunate Caledonians with her presence . . .


Flashman and the Tiger, p.289, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, Caledonian.

No, hardly

I didn’t doubt he’d called me a coward, you understand, but it ain’t the kind of thing a fellow says by way of social chat over the tea-cups is it? “Ah, Lady Flashman, delightful weather, is it not? And did you enjoy The Gondoliers? Such jolly tunes! No, I fear the dear Bishop’s health is not what it was . . . by the by, did I never tell you, your husband’s a bloody poltroon who ran screaming from Isa’Iwana? Oh, you hadn’t heard . . . ?” No, hardly.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.265, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, coward.

Nobody puts Flashy in the corner

      “Now you know the kind of woman you married. And if you spurn me it will break my heart — but I would do it again, a thousand times!” I’ll swear she gritted her teeth. “No one — no one! speaks ill of my hero, and that’s the size of it!”


Flashman and the Tiger, p.263, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, spurn.

my quizziest Flashy smile

I gave her a squeeze and a kiss and my quizziest Flashy smile. “We’ve never had any secrets from each other, have we?” I’ll fry in hell, no doubt about it.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.261, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, hell.

Alarming mixture

And while no normal human being would even have thought of such a thing, or had the audacity to attempt it, Elspeth had always been that alarming mixture of an idiot and a bearcat for nerve.



Flashman and the Tiger, p.260, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, nerve.

Her flash arts

      There is a tide in the affairs of men when you simply have to chuck it — as, for example, when you learn that the wife of your unsuspecting bosom is a practised thimblerigger who has used her flash arts to ruin an innocent man.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.260, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, wife.

Couthie and slee

. . . I put my knee against his, and smiled ‘couthie and slee’, to fetch him, for he always had a fancy to me, you know, and men are so vain and silly, even an old dame like me can gowk them . . .


Flashman and the Tiger, p.259, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, vain.

Deeply Moved

As always when deeply moved she was getting Scotcher by the minute . . .


Flashman and the Tiger, p.256, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, Scots.

Unimpeachable source

. . . and the source was unimpeachable — I’ve lived with her seventy years, after all, and know that while she may suppress a little veri and suggest a touch of falsi on occasion, Elspeth ain’t a liar.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.254, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, liar.

Always been ivory

      The deuce of it is, when Elspeth turns a conversation topsy-turvy, all wide-eyed innocence, you can never be sure whether it’s witlessness or guile. She’d always been ivory from her delightful neck upwards, but that don’t mean she can’t wheedle a duck from a pond when so minded.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.234, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, charm.

Try a little tenderness

      She took her lower lip gently in her teeth — a tiny gesture of puzzlement which has been turning my heart over since 1839.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.232, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, heart.

A near thing

      I love her dearly, far beyond any creature I’ve ever known, and I can prove it, for never once in almost seventy years of married life have I taken her by the throat. Mind you, it’s been a near thing, once or twice.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.232, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, throat.

We ain’t top-drawer

      She’s God’s own original snob, my little Paisley princess — as though her mill-owning father had been a whit better than the Wilsons. But the little skinflint had collared a peerage in his declining years, you see, and she seemed to think that his coronet and cash, with my V.C. and military rank, to say nothing of her own occasional intimacy with the Queen, raised us above the common herd. Which I guess they did, in an odd way — or if not above, apart at least. We ain’t top-drawer, but there’s no denying we’re different.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.229, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, snob.

Jingling her loot

      “Och, isn’t he the wee duck?” sighs she, jingling her loot as he hobbled away. “Aye, weel, mony a mickle mak’s a muckle, as Papa used to say.” She slipped it into her bag and broke into civilised speech.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.229, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, loot.

A pleasing gift

Aye. She’s always had the priceless gift of pleasing, has Elspeth, and making people laugh — for she’s a damned funny woman when she wants to be, a top-hole mimic, and all the more engaging because she plainly hasn't got two brains to rub together. “Never see her but it sets me in humour,” Palmerston used to say. That was her talent, to make folk happy.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.225, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, priceless.

Worn uncommon well

      By the time of Tranby, to be sure, Elspeth was of an age where it should have been unlikely that either Bertie or Cumming would try to drag her behind the sofa, but I still didn't care to think of her within the fat-fingered reach of one or the trim moustache of t’other. She’d worn uncommon well; middle sixties and still shaped like a Turkish belly-dancer, with the same guileless idiot smile and wondrous blue eyes that had set me slavering when she was sixteen — she'd performed like a demented houri then and who was to say she’d lost the taste in half a century?

Flashman and the Tiger, p.224, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, sofa.