Down in Pennyfields

‘I’d apologise for shaming you at the Athenaeum, but the sooner you’re out of that awful hole, the better. If they turf you out, come to me, I’ll put you up for a decent place — Madame Desirée’s, off the Haymarket, or a Chinese establishment I know down in Pennyfields.’



Mr American, p.392, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, shaming.

A frightful pub

     Mr Franklin mentioned that he was a member of the Athenaeum; perhaps the General would care to . . .
     ‘That’s a frightful pub,’ said Sir Harry gloomily. ‘Jumped up schoolmasters and bloody bishops. Won’t do your standing any good to take me there — still, if you’re game, I am. Don’t let me fall asleep, though, because if I wake up there in that long room of theirs I’ll think I’m dead and waiting in some ante-room to the Day of Judgement.’


Mr American, p.388, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, member.

Bailing her out did

‘Cost me my membership of the United Services Club, bailing her out did.’ He glared resentfully. ‘Not that I cared a dam about that — place had gone down scandalously of late . . . well, dammit, the King’s a member, and you can’t do much worse than that, can you?’


Mr American, p.187, Pan Books, paperback edition 1982.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, club.

The United Service card room

. . . I was cut stone dead by someone a deal more important — the Prince of Wales, no less, shied away from me in the United Service card room, and hightailed it as fast as his ponderous guts would let him, giving me a shifty squint over his shoulder as he went. That, I confess, I found pretty raw. It’s embarrassing enough to be cut by the most vulgar man in Europe, but when he is also a Prince who is deeply in your debt you begin to wonder what royalty’s coming to.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.292, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, vulgar.

The English view

“What did you think of him . . . from an English point of view, I mean?”
… “From an English point of view? Well, they’d not take him in Whites . . . not sure about Reform, though.”


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.342, Harper Collins, 1995.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, English.

Villainous two-rupee bravos

…I surveyed the company: villainous two-rupee bravos, painted harpies who should have been perched in trees, a seedy flute-and-tom-tom band accompanying a couple of gyrating nautches whom you wouldn’t have touched with a long pole, and Sikh brandy fit to corrode a bucket. I’ll never say a word against Boodle’s again, says I to myself; at least there you don’t have to sit with your back to the wall.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, pp.170-71, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, survey.

London clubs

In my time I’ve played nap in the Australian diggings with gold-dust stakes, held a blackjack bank on a South Sea trader, and been in a poker game in a Dodge City livery stable with the pistols down on the blanket – and I’ve met less sharping in all of ’em put together than you’d find in one evening in a London club.

Royal Flash, p.14, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.