Rogue male
THE BROTHERS HITCHENS famously did not agree on very much, but one matter that brought them into rare accord was the genius of the author George MacDonald Fraser and his character Flashman. Christopher wrote in 2008 that “I can remember the mingled shock and glee with which my radical friend Andrew Cockburn and I discovered … that we had both recently fallen for the same author and character. I have met that look, of the confirmed addict and fellow-sufferer, many times since.”
Peter, meanwhile, has called him “a genius of our time”, and said, “I have learned more history from MacDonald Fraser than from practically anyone else and I have enjoyed doing so”. He praised his Flashman books as “not only based on the cleverest conceit imaginable” but that “they fulfil the promise of the idea a thousandfold, full to the brim, pressed down and running over.”
There are certain historical novelists who create
