HURRAH FOR FLASHY!

WHILE Roald Dahl books are having the word 'fat' edited out and sensitivity readers and moral puritans are on hand to scrutinise our every utterance, one of literature's greatest antiheroes is still entertaining readers more than 50 years after his first appearance.

- H.B. Lyle

And thank goodness.
Sir Harry Flashman, Flashy to his friends, is a racist, sexist, bigoted homophobe, an Empire-builder and a selfish, cowardly cad. And yet, still, readers love him.

Flashman, the hero of George MacDonald Fraser's 12-book series, started life as the irredeemable bully in Thomas Hughes's classic and rather po-faced tale of public-school life, Tom Brown's Schooldays.

Unlike the pious Tom, Flashman has no time for chapel, preferring to roast small boys over the fire. He's eventually expelled for getting "beastly drunk" and that's the last the world would hear of him.

Until, that is, more than a century later when Flashman's memoirs were discovered in a Leicestershire auction house, and the world finally realised that the decorated, world-famous Victorian military hero is actually the very same bully of Rugby School.

That is the great literary conceit of MacDonald Fraser to take a fictional character from one novel, and throw him into real history. The Scottish author pretended to be the 'editor' of the Flashman Papers, as if the books were indeed the secret memoirs of the famous hero.

But the biggest joke of all is that Flashman is no hero he's still the same cowardly bully he always was, only through a series of outrageously lucky breaks the world never finds out. At the end of his very first campaign, Flashman is the last survivor of the Army's disastrous retreat from Kabul.

Holed up in a tiny fort with the gallant Sergeant Hudson, Flashman leaves it to Hudson to fight off the Afghans.

As Hudson dies, Flashman desperately tries to pull down the British flag - in order to surrender but ends up passing out wrapped in the red, white and blue. And of course, as the rescuers relieve the fort just in time, they assume that the brave young Flashy has wrapped himself in the flag in a last, gallant act of defiance.