As I said

As I said to Speedicut, it’s hell in the diplomatic.



Flashman on the March, p.175, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Genteel sponging

. . . I learned that he was in the diplomatic, which didn’t surprise me, for he was a born toad-eater with a great gift of genteel sponging and an aversion to work.


Flashman on the March, p.10, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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The perils of diplomacy

It’s a hellish bore, like all diplomaticking.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.23, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Never mind the Moulin Rouge

My advice to young chaps is to never mind the Moulin Rouge and Pigalle, but make for some diplomatic mêlée on the Rue de Lisbonne, catch the eye of a well-fleshed countess, and ere the night’s out you’ll have learned something you won’t want to tell your grandchildren.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.16, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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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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I’m a soldier, not a diplomat

‘Your highness,’ says I, ‘I can’t talk like Mr Erskine, or Captain Skene even. I’m a soldier, not a diplomat, so I won’t mince words.’ And thereafter I minced them for all I was worth…

Flashman in the Great Game, pp.80-81, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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Cardinal folly

Master Ignatieff might be a clever and devilish dangerous man, but he had at least one of the besetting weaknesses of youth: he was as vain as an Etonian duke, and it led him to commit the cardinal folly in a diplomatic man. He talked too much.

Flashman at the Charge, p.207, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Ideal partners

‘But that’s the point!’ He clapped his hands. ‘We are the ideal partners – neither of us trusts the other an inch, but we need each other. It’s the only guarantee in any business. You’re as big a rascal as I am; we would sell each other tomorrow, but there isn’t the need.
   Our financiers know all of this, of course, but I’ve often thought that our diplomats and politicians could have gone to school to Professor Starnberg.

Royal Flash, p.220, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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A chancy business

…a crowd was milling round the spot where McNaghten had fallen; even as I watched they began to yell and dance, and I saw a spear upthrust with something grey stuck on the end of it. Just for an instant I thought: ‘Well Burnes will get the job now,’ and then I remembered Burnes was dead. Say what you like, the political service is a chancy business.

Flashman, p.162, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,William McNaghten.