In days gone by

You’ll recall Cumming was among those I’d suspected of dancing the honeymoon hornpipe with my dear one in days gone by . . .


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


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A prime subject

It was bound to get out — as I’d determined it should from the moment I’d stood in Gordon-Cumming’s presence, weighed him up, and realised what a prime subject he was for shoving down the drain.


Flashman and the Tiger, p246, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Suspicious agricultural activity

I’ve told you my score against Gordon-Cumming — a natural detestation of his supercilious vanity, his unconcealed dislike of me, above all the suspicion that he’d ploughed with my heifer . . .


Flashman and the Tiger, p.240, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Bellowing his grievance

Had I ever, I wondered, encountered such an immortally conceited ass with a truer touch for self-destruction? George Custer came to mind. Aye put him and Gordon-Cumming on the edge of a precipice and I’d not care to bet which would tumble first into the void, bellowing his grievance.

Flashman and the Tiger, p.240, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Titled fury

      Talk about a woman scorned; their fury ain’t in it with a Scotch Baronet’s wounded self-esteem.



Flashman and the Tiger, p.240, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Bellies and loins

      Berkeley Levett, a sound muttonhead in Cumming’s regiment, and presumably as well disposed to his chief as subalterns ever are, given that Guards officers are usually incapable of any feeling outside their bellies and loins.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.227, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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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.