Backhanded tribute

It's a backhanded tribute to the memory of the late unlamented Rudi Von Starnberg that my first impulse on meeting his offspring was to look for the communication cord and bawl for help. Time was I’d ha’ done both, but when you've reached your sixties you've either learned to bottle your panic, sit tight, and think like blazes . . . or you haven't reached your sixties, mallum?*

* understand?


Flashman and the Tiger, p.77, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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A running tongue

I never did learn to speak Apache properly. Mind you, it ain’t easy, mainly because the red brutes seldom stand still long enough – and if you’ve any sense, you don’t either…

Flashman and the Redskins, p.17, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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This wicked life

If I’ve learned one thing in this wicked life, it is that no one, however rich, lays out cash for nothing, and the more they spend the rummer the business is likely to be.

Royal Flash, p.63, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes.

Learn a foreign tongue

I give the advice for what it is worth: if you wish to learn a foreign tongue properly, study it in bed with a native girl – I’d have got more of the classics from an hour’s wrestling with a Greek wench than I did in four years from Arnold.

Flashman, p.71, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes, learn, foreign language.