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“... Sir Harry Flashman VC, was himself a man at arms. As a one-striper in General Slim’s 14th Army George MacDonaldFraser took part in ‘the last great battle in the last great war’, a showdown which was also ‘the final echo of Kipling’s world’. More specifically, it was the struggle for Meiktila and Pyawbwe ...”

“... Voldemort, ‘that blackguard Flashman, who never speaks to one without a kick or an oath’. George MacDonaldFraser’s series of novels about him – known collectively as The Flashman Papers, the first of which appeared in 1969 – are, I would guess, read much more widely than their worthy Victorian ...”

“... novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonaldFraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their ...”

“... name of Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonaldFraser defines his art in a foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova, but one who delighted in a spot of swashbuckling. At the same time he was recognised as a serious historian who had published authoritative ...”

“... as a male concubine to this Eastern Circe.’ That is the sort of career break the Flashman of George MacDonaldFraser could have taken in his stride, but Rohmer’s males have ‘a marked streak of puritanism’ in them, saying things like ‘I had never been a woman’s man’ or ‘I was never a squire of ...”

“... is OK now, he says, he can rest on his laurels in his handsome study in Connecticut, reading George MacDonaldFraser and Patrick O’Brian, and he’s always ‘got some historical work on the go’: Nelson, World War Two, the ancient Romans. Before the settling down, though, back in 1973, while Richards was in ...”

“... rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands ...”

“... are to be found in the Middle Ages among the fighting families of the Anglo-Scottish Border, as George MacDonaldFraser’s book The Steel Bonnets makes clear.* His synonymous reivers, raiders or riders used to get off their horses and play the football that became soccer and rugby, and they were not afraid of a few ...”

“... Why do you use such discriminatory language?’ In June 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Yousaf made a speech at Holyrood about Scotland’s failure to confront its own racism. ‘One of the most racist and divisive speeches I have ever heard,’ Robertson said. ‘A middle-class, private school privileged man, playing the victim.’ He ...”

“... to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonaldFraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and weed-choked concrete landscapes that appear again and again in JGB’s imagined futures, the ...”

“... royal work, was twenty years in the making, but thought so dreadful that Victoria’s grandson George V had it destroyed (it lives on in various copies and mezzotints). She had laid out her vision for the picture in her journal: ‘the solitude, the sport, and the Highlanders in the water &c. will be, as Landseer says, a beautiful historical ...”

“... over the English Channel towards the chalk cliffs of Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, both the shot and George Fenton’s orchestral score slyly reminiscent of the opening of The Sound of Music, though the solitary figure who gradually comes into view on the cliff edge is dressed in a sturdy bright blue anorak rather than the costume of a novice nun. Unlike Julie ...”

“... Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT by an Old Citizen’, Scott dubbed a principal ...”