Via return of post

      “My views sir? Can’t think I have many . . . oh, I don’t know, though. Wouldn’t mind suggesting to Her Majesty’s ministers that next time they get a letter from a touchy barbarian despot, it might save ’em a deal of trouble if they sent him a civil reply via return of post . . . ”



Flashman on the March, p.287, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, post.

The mystery that binds

“…no. He’s teaching China. The word will go to the ends of the Empire — how the barbarians came, and smashed the chalice, and went away. And for the first time all China will realise, that they’re not the world’s core, that their Emperor is not God, and that the dream they’ve lived in for thousands of years, is just . . . a dream. Gros was right—it’ll bring down the Manchoos, no error, not today, perhaps not for years, but at last. The mystery that binds China will go up in smoke with the Summer Palace, you see. And just by the way — China will break no more treaties; not in our time.”
      I thought about Yehonala, and wondered if he was right. As it turned out, he was, almost; China was quiet for forty years, until she roused the Boxers against us. And now the Manchoos are gone, and who’ll deny it was the fire that Elgin kindled that made China’s millions think thoughts they’d never thought before?

Flashman and the Dragon, p.279, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



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Retailing rumours

      “The barbarians! Fly for your lives! They are in the city — the streets run with blood! Everyone is dead, the Temple of Heaven is overthrown, the shops are closed!”

Flashman and the Dragon, p.244, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, barbarians.

Hard as a hammer

. . .he listened with his bare forearms set on the table, John Bull to the life; he’d be fifty years then, the Big Barbarian, as the Chinese called him, bald as an egg save for a few little white wisps, with his bulldog lip and sudden barks of anger or laughter. A peppery old buffer, and a deal kinder than he looked — how many ambassadors would call on a colonel’s wife to carry a letter to her man? — and the shrewdest diplomat of his day, hard as a hammer and subtle as a Spaniard. Best of all he had common sense.


Flashman and the Dragon, p.162, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



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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.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, barbarian.

A fine psychologist

He was a fine psychologist—you’ll note he had weighed me for a fugitive and a scoundrel on short acquaintance—an astute politician, and a bloody, cruel, treacherous barbarian who’d have been a disgrace to the Stone Age. If that seems contradictory—well, Indians are contrary critters, and Apaches more than most.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.169, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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A monocle isn't likely to impress

     Possibly because I’ve spent so much time as the unwilling guest of various barbarians around the world, I’ve learned to mistrust romances in which the white hero wins the awestruck regard of the silly savages by sporting a monocle or predicting a convenient eclipse, whereafter they worship him as a god, or make him blood brother, and in no time he’s teaching ‘em close order drill and crop rotation, and generally running the whole show. In my experience, they know all about eclipses, and a monocle isn’t likely to impress an aborigine who wears a bone through his nose.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.161, Pan Books edition, 1983.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, monocle.