They are also, you should be warned, as politically incorrect as it is possible to be and this may have dented their popularity in recent years.īut I think they can still be enjoyed, provided you don’t take them too seriously. The books are brilliantly researched with notes and annotations and if you are interested in the history of Britain from 1840 onwards, you’ll find a plethora of detail – social, political, historical – that will give you a superb insight into life at the time of the Empire. His escapades are often hilarious but at the same time, they’re quite horrific too.
He gets caught up in the Charge of the Light Brigade (during which he has an uncontrollable attack of flatulence), the Siege of Khartoum, the American slave trade and the Indian Mutiny. Among the real people that Flashman meets are General Custer, Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and many others. The books are wonderfully funny and inventive but what makes them unique is the way they mix fiction and historical fact. The stories are told by him in his old age, looking back at his ill-gotten gains. The joke is that Flashman is never anything but a bully, a coward and a womaniser…but due to a series of coincidences and mistakes, Queen Victoria and the British public believe him to be a hero. He took the bully, Harry Flashman, who famously appears in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and followed his career across the world when the British Empire was at its most powerful. George Macdonald Fraser had a brilliant idea. I started reading them in my late teens (the first one came out in 1969) and my sons have both loved them too. “I have always had a passion for the Flashman books by George Macdonald Fraser. He remembers the books which captured his imagination as a teenager.
This month, we are grateful for a choice from writer Anthony Horowitz, author of more than 40 books including the bestselling Alex Rider series.
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