Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game

Description

Flashman and the Great Game takes our man into the world of Kim, as he spies for the British, dallies with a luscious maharani and - despite spectacular acts of spinelessness - not only survives the bloodbath of the Indian Mutiny but emerges with a Victoria Cross and a knighthood.Impossible to put down and some of the greatest comic writing of the last 100 years. For George MacDonald Fraser the bully Flashman was easily the most interesting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and imaginative speculation as to what might have happened to him after his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness ended in 12 volumes of memoirs in which Sir Harry Paget Flashman - self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward -'and, oh yes, a toady' - romps his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling and often hilarious series of military and amorous adventures. In Flashman the youthful hero, armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, is shipped to India, woos and wins the beautiful Elspeth, and reluctantly takes part in the first Anglo-Afghan War, honing a remarkable talent for self-preservation.Flash for Freedom! finds him crewing on an African slave ship, hiding in a New Orleans whorehouse and fortuitously running into rising young American politician Abraham Lincoln...

George MacDonald Fraser was born in Carlisle in 1925. He fought in Burma during World War II and took up a career in journalism on his return, spending many years with the Glasgow Herald. The success of the Flashman novels enabled him to devote his time to fiction. He died in 2008.;;INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY-;Michael Dirda is a book critic on the Washington Post.