The 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Harry Flashman VC has been greeted with an outpouring of affection and admiration. You can imagine the old rogue laughing off the adulation, while inwardly relishing it all.
And yes, I know, unlike those allegedly credulous American first reviewers, that Flashman wasn’t real. For all his creator George MacDonald Fraser’s meticulous research and poker-faced footnotes to the Flashman Papers, the novels follow the fortunes of a fictional character of someone else’s invention – Thomas Hughes.
Hughes had already muddied, the headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold, who expels Flashman from Rugby for drunkenness.
