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.


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Beat their bellies

…I was content to idle my way through the dinner, which like all American meals was gargantuan and over-rich; how the devil they can put away a massive breakfast of steak, ham, eggs, terrapin, or giant oysters, two dinners at noon and five, and still be fit to beat their bellies at supper, is beyond me; even Annette, who wasn’t two pisspots and a handle high, worked her way through five courses without breaking a sweat on her pale immaculate brow.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, pp.139-40, Harper Collins, 1995.


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Unbridled appetite

     Perhaps, on consideration, I’m wrong to call her a monster — unless it’s monsterous to indulge an unbridled appetite without regard for anyone or anything. Yes, I think that’s right: I do, and I’m a monster.

Flashman and the Dragon, p.238, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



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I don't bilk at much

I don’t bilk at much: I watched them blowing sepoys from the ends of guns at Cawnpore, and I ate my dinner at Peking an hour after the massacre, but I confess Spring’s method of disposing of incriminating evidence made me gulp.

Flash For Freedom!, p.113, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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