Safety in numbers, what?

      “Careful o’ that one, sir. She’d a Haymarket Hussar,* and quite desperate altogether.” From which I gathered he, too, had taken the lady’s fancy, and avoided her for his own good.
      “Haymarket or Grant Road?” says I, and he said ’twas no joke, Theodore being a real mad miser with his women. “A fellow on sentry-go at the hareem cadged a cup of tej from one of the concubines, and was lashed to a pulp. Best to keep together when the likes of Madam Tamagno’s on the prowl; safety in numbers, what?”
      Unless she likes to drill by platoons,” says I, and he exclaimed “I say!” . . .


*Haymarket Hussar: a courtesan of the better class. Grant Road was the prostitutes’ quarter in Bombay


Flashman on the March, p.217, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, fancy.

Size of a tangerine

All kind of mad fancies flit by — not to be taken seriously, you understand, but food for wild imaginings — like bleaching your hair and striking out for Valparaiso under the name of Butterworth and never looking near England again . . . two million quid, Lord love us! Aye, but d’you dispose of a diamond the size of a tangerine?

Flashman and the Mountain of Light, p.314, Fontana Paperback edition, 1991.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, tangerine.

Pirates and roses

Well. well, thinks I, who’d have thought it: the mad pirate-killer and rose-fancier, spoony on Angie Coutts’s picture – I’ll bet that every time he contemplates it the local Dyak lasses have to scamper for cover.

Flashman's Lady, p.133, Pan edition, 1979.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, scamper.