Harrowing preferences

“I wish to have him educated at a great English school, such as one I have heard of . . . Harrah?”
     “Harrow? Certainly not your majesty. Lair of Bestial. Parvenus. Rugby’s the place for your lad . . . ”

Flashman on the March, p.208, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, school.

A sort of English Texas

. . . nor do I enjoy the unsought hospitality of Society parvenus in the wilds of Yorkshire (a sort of English Texas peopled by coarse braggarts and one or two decent slow bowlers) with nothing to do but watch horses run in the pouring rain.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.222, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, Yorkshire.

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.

Tags:
Flashman, James Brudenell, Lord Cardigan.