A pleasing gift

Aye. She’s always had the priceless gift of pleasing, has Elspeth, and making people laugh — for she’s a damned funny woman when she wants to be, a top-hole mimic, and all the more engaging because she plainly hasn't got two brains to rub together. “Never see her but it sets me in humour,” Palmerston used to say. That was her talent, to make folk happy.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.225, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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Carnal intent, hurrah!

      The discovery that you've been sold a pup is always disconcerting, but your reaction depends on age and experience. In infancy you burst into tears and smash something; in adolescence you may be bewildered (as I was when Lady Geraldine lured me into the long grass on flase pretence and then set about me with carnal intent, hurrah!); in riper manhood common sense usually tells you to bolt, which was my instinct on the Pearl River when I learned that my lorcha was carrying not opium, as I'd supposed, but guns for the Taiping rebels. But at sixty-one your brain works faster than your legs, so you reflect, and as often as not reach the right answer by intuition as well as reason.

Flashman and the Tiger, p.134, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.

 
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Crossed legs

For a moment I wondered if having his love-muscle shot off had affected his brain…

Flashman's Lady, p.140, Pan edition, 1979.

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And so have his brains blown out

Several times it had occurred to me on the campaign that it would be a capital thing if he could be induced into action where he might well be hit between the legs and so have his brains blown out, but he’d not looked like taking a scratch so far.

Flashman at the Charge, p.99, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

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Can't have missed by much

‘The Afghans murder our people, try to make off with our wives, order us out of the country, and what does our commander do? Shoots himself in the arse – doubtless in an attempt to blow his brains out. He can’t have missed by much.’

Flashman, p.167, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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