Her flash arts

      There is a tide in the affairs of men when you simply have to chuck it — as, for example, when you learn that the wife of your unsuspecting bosom is a practised thimblerigger who has used her flash arts to ruin an innocent man.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.260, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Your glorious pedestal

“Aye,” says he sourly, looking me up and down, “I wish I’d a guinea for every poor bastard whose bones must have gone into making your glorious pedestal. Gaudetque viam fecisse ruina,* I’ll lay!”

*He rejoices to have made his way by ruin – Lucan.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.41, Harper Collins, 1995.


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Doing his duty

If you had taken the greatest military geniuses of the ages, placed them in command of our army, and asked them to ruin it utterly as speedily as possible, they could not – I mean it seriously – have done it as surely and swiftly as he [Elphinstone] did. And he believed he was doing his duty.
The meanest sweeper in our train would have been a fitter commander.

Flashman, p.176, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,William Elphinstone, Elphy Bey.