Foreign service

      I’ve never cared, much, for service with foreign forces. At best it’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and the rations are likely to pay havoc with your innards. The American Confederates weren’t bad, I suppose, bar their habit of spitting on carpets, and the worse I can say of the Yankees is that they took soldiering seriously and seemed to be under the impression that they had invented it.


Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.214, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



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A belted earl

      But I suspect he had another reason, which he may not have admitted to himself: I believe that the Summer Palace offended Elgin; that the thought of so much luxury and extravagance for the pleasure of the privileged, selfish few, while the coolie millions paid for it and lived in squalor, was too much for his Scottish stomach. Odd notion for a belted earl you think? Well, perhaps I’m wrong.

Flashman and the Dragon, p.281, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



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Sipping in the stillness

Then we sat sipping in the stillness for about a week, and my belly gurgling like the town drains.



Flashman and the Dragon, p.93, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



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A word on tweed coats

…he had that manly, open-air reek about him that I can’t stomach, what with his tweed coat (I’ll bet he rubbed his horse down with it) and sporting cap; not my style at all.

Flashman's Lady, p.15, Pan edition, 1979.

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I don't bilk at much

I don’t bilk at much: I watched them blowing sepoys from the ends of guns at Cawnpore, and I ate my dinner at Peking an hour after the massacre, but I confess Spring’s method of disposing of incriminating evidence made me gulp.

Flash For Freedom!, p.113, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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A look at hell

My stomach doesn’t turn easy, but I was sickened. If it had been left to me, there and then, I’d have let ‘em go, the whole boiling lot of them, back to their lousy jungle… when you’ve looked into the hold of a new-laden slaver for the first time, you know what hell is like.

Flash For Freedom!, p.90, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.