Frowning judicially

      “Wot abaht the slaves, sir?” says bosun. “Them black devils is liable to cut their throats aht o’ spite if we sink her.”
       Ballantyne weighed this for a good two seconds, frowning judicially like Buggins Major undecided whether to thrash Juggins minor or set him a hundred lines of Virgil.


Flashman on the March, p.19, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Free and easy style

. . . my bootneck sergeant scowled disapproval; he wasn’t use to the free and easy style of these Navy youngsters who couldn’t help bring their fifth-form ways to sea, and treated their men more like a football of which they were the captain, than a crew. It was natural enough: the cornet or ensign in the Army, when he joined his regiment for the first time, entered a world of rigid formality and discipline, but here was this lad just out of his ’teens with a little floating kingdom all his own, sent to fight slavers and pirates, chase smugglers, shepherd pilgrims, and escort the precious bullion on which a whole British army would depend — and not a senior to turn to for advice or guidance, but only his own sense and judgment.


Flashman on the March, p.17, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



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Experts will tell you

…none of it compared with the black jade chessmen I collared in the Birthday Garden a few days later; no one else would even look at ’em, which showed judgment, since the experts will tell you that black jade doesn’t exist. I don’t mind; all I know is that while Lucknow paid for Gandamack Lodge, those chessmen bought me the place on Berkeley Square.

Flashman and the Dragon, p.270, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



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