The Queen of course had her nose into everything…And after years in purdah, she had taken to gallivanting on a grand scale…But what had tickled her most, it seemed, was being photographed in full fig as Empress of India; it had given her quite an Indian fever…hence the resolve to learn Hindi. “But what else, SIr Harry, would best mark our signal regard for our Indian subjects, do you think?” Baksheesh, booze, and bints was the answer to that, but I chewed on a muffin, looking grave, and said…
-Flashman and the Mountain of Light, George MacDonald Fraser
Reading the Flashman Papers was once one of my bad habits. Now I’ve kicked it, after all twelve books. Yes there was bawdy talk and history turned on its head, and I especially liked the send-up of imperial galumphery, but I have been to many of the places where Flashman played his bit parts and I am not impressed. Fraser apparently never went there himself.
But I do like the straight lines that Flashman draws between Buckingham Palace and the many battle fields in Africa and Asia where Britain stood its ground for no good reason and to no good end. The Afghan Wars, the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Game, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the March on Magdala whose booty the V&A still has on display…all places where Kim grown up into a drunken lout would alongside Flashman have made an equal mess of God and Country.