In search of a hero

     It’s being six foot two and desperate-looking, that does it, you know; if I’d been short-arsed with no chin and knock-knees, no one in search of a hero would have looked at me twice.


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.130, Harper Collins, 1995.


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Squinted wisely

…he fixed his thumbs in his belt and squinted wisely at me, like an owl in labour…

Flashman's Lady, p.18, Pan edition, 1979.

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A quick look

I was roaring above the noise, at her, swearing I loved her and that she could still save herself, and she shot me a quick look as she took the mare’s bridle – just for an instant, but it’s stayed with me for fifty years, and you may think me an old fool and fanciful, but I’ll swear there were tears in her eyes…

Flashman in the Great Game, pp.314-5, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes, look.

Knowing and quizzical

And he looked knowing and quizzical, like someone smiling with a mouthful of salts.

Flashman at the Charge, p.30, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Spoilt child of fortune

His nose was beaky and his eyes blue and prominent and unwinking - they looked out on the world with the serinity that marks the nobleman whose uttermost ancestor was born a nobleman too. It is the look your parvenu would give half his fortune for, that unruffable gaze of the spoilt child of fortune who knows with unshakable certainty that he is right and that the world is exactly ordered for his satisfaction.

It is the look that makes underlings writhe and causes revolutions. I saw it then , and it remained changeless as long as I knew him, even through the roll-call beneath Causeway Heights when the grim silence as the names were shouted out testified to the loss of five hundred of his command. 'It is no fault of mine,' he said than, and he didn't just believe it; he knew it.



Flashman, p. 31, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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