Prefer to substitute

     Somewhere or other that downy bird Kipling observes that the lesson of the island race is to put away all emotion and entrap the alien at the proper time.* I learned it in my cradle, long before he wrote it, and have practised it all my life with some success, and only this difference, that for “entrap” I prefer to substitute “escape”.

* Footnote 16: The quotation is from "In Ambush", in Stalky & Co.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.89, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Beat the drum

…and when the press starts to beat the drum and the public are clamouring for the foreigner’s blood to be spilled – by someone other than themselves – they have a habit of looking around for their old champions.

Flashman at the Charge, p.12, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Rude with impunity

But in my youth and ignorance I imagined that he was one of those to whom I could be rude with impunity – servants, tarts, bagman, shopkeepers, and foreigners…

Royal Flash, p.11, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.