His quiet smile

      There was general laughter at this, and Napier said with his quiet smile that we must resign ourselves to being regarded as callously irresponsible or rapaciously greedy. “Brutal indifference or selfish imperialism; those are the choices. As an old Scotch maidservant of my acquaintance used to say: ‘Ye cannae dae right for daein’ wrang!’


Flashman on the March, pp.286-7, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



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Savage females of the species

… I say this without conceit, since it ain’t my doing — while civilized women have been more than ordinarily partial to me, my most ardent admirers have been the savage females of the species. Take the captain of Gezo’s Amazons, for example, who’d ogled me so outrageously during the death-house feast; or Sonsee-array the Apache (my fourth wife, in a manner of speaking); or Queen Ranavalona, who’d once confessed shyly that when I died she intended to have part of me pickled in a bottle, and worshipped; or Lady Caroline Lamb — the Dahomey slave, not the other one, who was before my time. Yes, I’ve done well among the barbarian ladies. Elspeth, of course, is Scottish.



Flashman and the Dragon, p.81, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.


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One degree more snobbish

Being a Scotch tradesman’s daughter, my darling was one degree more snobbish than a penniless Spanish duke, and in the days before we went north her condescension to her middle-class friends would have turned your stomach.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.19, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,snobbish, condescension.

Genteel boisterous things

The young women are mostly great, genteel boisterous things who are no doubt bedworthy enough if your taste runs that way. (One acquaintance of mine who had a Scotch clergyman's daughter described it as like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons.)





Flashman, p. 51, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Scotswomen.