The old hulks

‘That’s the way we all go — the old hulks!’ The General tugged angrily at his moustache. ‘You can ruin yourself being battered and chased and shot at half your life, and fighting like hell on behalf of a lot of damned lickspittles who infest cesspits like the Athenaeum Club where they put too much damned salt in the damned consommé and try to poison people with curried turtle soup that would make a Bengali privy cleaner sick — not that I ever fought except when I couldn’t avoid it, but any man’s a bloody fool who does otherwise — and what d’you get for it at the end of the day? His voice was rising steadily, and his eyes glaring horribly. ‘I’ll tell you what you get — a set of tinware and a few meaningless titles and a pension that won’t keep your blasted dog in bones, and your niece, a lady of quality, expressing her proper contempt for a worthless travesty of a picture by some mountebank whom you wouldn’t pay to distemper a kitchen ceiling, may be hauled into a police court, subjected to the degradation of a public trial — ’


Mr American, p.391, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.



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A fleeing Flashy

Ask any man who’s been hit foursquare by a fleeing Flashy, fourteen stone of terrified bone and muscle, and he’ll agree that it’s a moving experience . . .



Flashman on the March, p.240, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Another ruined village

We had reined in on the outskirts of yet another ruined village, beside a little walled enclosure filled with a great pile of bones, many of them plainly belonging to infants. I ain’t over-queasy, as you know, but the thought of how they’d come to be there turned my stomach. Uliba viewed them dispassionately.
       “Thus Theodore wins the love of his people.”


Flashman on the March, p.105, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Bred in the bone

      That, of course, was the point. She was my grand-daughter, and what’s bred in the bone . . . oh, but she’d hocussed me properly, playing shrinking Purity, and I’d been ready to shell out half my fortune — and I’d come within an ace of committing murder for her.



Flashman and the Tiger, pp.310-11, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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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.

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Keeping himself nice

The Prince Carl Gustaf hadn’t had pox at all; he was clean as an old bone.

Royal Flash, p.181, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.