Madmen with a mission

      Looking back on life, I guess I can’t complain on the whole, but if I have a grievance against Fate, it’s that I seem to have encountered more than my fair share of madmen with a mission. Perhaps I’ve been unlucky, or possibly most of mankind is deranged; maybe it was my stalwart bearing, or my derring-do reputation, but whatever it was, they came at me like wasps to a saucer of jam.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.98, Harper Collins, 1995.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, fate.

The forgotten brigadier

      Historians say that on that one moment, as the Khalsa’s spearhead was rushing at our throat, rested the three centuries of British India. Perhaps. It was surely the moment in which Gough’s battered little army stared certain death and destruction in the face, and whatever may have settled our fate later, one man turned the hinge then and there. Without him, we (aye, and perhaps all of India) would have been swept away in bloody ruin. I’ll wager you’ve never heard of him, the forgotten brigadier, Mickey White.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.260, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.


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Blind luck

      You’ll have difficulty finding Ferozeshah (or Pheeroo Shah, as we Punjabi purists call it) in the atlas nowadays. It’s a scrubby little hamlet about halfway between Ferozepore and Moodkee, but in its way it’s a greater place than Delhi or Calcutta or Bombay, for it’s where the fate of India was settled — appropriately by treachery, folly, and idiot courage beyond belief. And most of all, by blind luck.



Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.245, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, luck.

You can't fight fate

…but you can’t fight fate, especially when he’s called Palmerston.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.14, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,fate, Palmerston.