About the author


George MacDonald Fraser served in a Highland Regiment in India and the Middle East, worked on newspapers in Britain and Canada, and has written many bestselling novels, and numerous films. His experiences as a screenwriter are recorded in the memoir The Light’s On at Signpost. The latest Flashman volume, Flashman on the March, was published earlier this year.

About the book

What happened to Flashman, the caddish bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays, after he was expelled from Rugby School in the 1830s. For a century the fate of history's most notorious schoolboy remained a mystery - until in 1966 George MacDonald Fraser decided to discover a collection of manuscripts. Since then the scandalous saga of Flashman, Victorian hero and scoundrel, has emerged in a series of bestselling memoirs in which the arch-cad reviews, from the safety of old age, his exploits in bed and battle.

In this first installment, Flashman is reluctantly employed as a secret agent in Afganistan.

Read an extract

“Hughes got it wrong, in one important detail. You will have read, in Tom Brown, how I was expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness, which is true enough, but when Hughes alleges that this was the result of my deliberately pouring beer on top of gin-punch, he is in error. I knew better than to mix my drinks, even at seventeen.

I mention this, not in self-defence, but in the interests of strict truth. This story will be completely truthful; I am breaking the habit of eighty years. Why shouldn’t I? When a man is as old as I am, and knows himself thoroughly for what he was and is, he doesn’t care much. I’m not ashamed, you see; never was — and I have enough on what Society would consider the credit side of the ledger — a knighthood, a Victoria Cross, high rank, and some popular fame. So I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer in Cardigan’s Hussars; tall, masterful, and roughly handsome I was in those days (even Hughes allowed that I was big and strong, and had considerable powers of being pleasant), and say that it is the portrait of a liar, a scoundrel, a cheat, a thief, a coward — and, oh yes, a toady. Hughes said more or less all these things, and his description was pretty fair, except in matters of detail such as the one I ’ve just mentioned. But he was more concerned to preach a sermon than to give facts.

But I am concerned with facts, and since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured that they are true.”

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