Harry Paget Flashman
Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC KCB KCIE is a fictional character created by George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008), but based on the character "Flashman" in Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), a semi-autobiographical work by Thomas Hughes (1822–1896).
In Hughes' book, Flashman (a relatively minor character) is a notorious bully at Rugby School who persecutes Tom Brown, and who is finally expelled for drunkenness. Fraser decided to write Flashman's memoirs, in which the school bully would be identified with an "illustrious Victorian soldier": experiencing many 19th-century wars and adventures and rising to high rank in the British Army, acclaimed as a great soldier, while remaining by his unapologetic self-description "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady." Fraser's Flashman is an antihero who runs from danger or hides cowering in fear, betrays or abandons acquaintances at the slightest incentive, bullies and beats servants with gusto, beds every available woman, carries off any loot he can grab, and gambles and boozes enthusiastically. Nevertheless, through a combination of luck and cunning, he usually ends each volume acclaimed as a hero.
Read more about Harry Paget Flashman: Flashman's Origins, Style and Layout of The Stories, Flashman The Man, Volumes of The Flashman Papers, Flashman Papers in Chronological Order, Flashman's Women, Adaptations, Homages, Historical Characters Referenced in The Flashman Novels
Famous quotes containing the word harry:
“All my life I’ve been running, from welfare officers, thugs, my father. See, there they are [the killers]. There on the bridge. I’m a dead man. Nosseros told me that. He told me. He said, “You got it all, but you’re a dead man, Harry Fabian.””
—Jo Eisinger, and Jules Dassin. Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark)