A monocle isn't likely to impress

     Possibly because I’ve spent so much time as the unwilling guest of various barbarians around the world, I’ve learned to mistrust romances in which the white hero wins the awestruck regard of the silly savages by sporting a monocle or predicting a convenient eclipse, whereafter they worship him as a god, or make him blood brother, and in no time he’s teaching ‘em close order drill and crop rotation, and generally running the whole show. In my experience, they know all about eclipses, and a monocle isn’t likely to impress an aborigine who wears a bone through his nose.

Flashman and the Redskins, p.161, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Strange in the twentieth century

I also carried away from that table an impression of Mr Lincoln’s views on slaves and slavery which must seem strange in the twentieth century since it varies somewhat from popular belief. I recall, for example, that at one point he described the negroes as ‘the most confounded nuisance on this continent, not excepting the Democrats’.

Flash For Freedom!, p.128, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Abraham Lincoln.