NJS,

Indeed. The photo speaks volumes. Cravat at the top and those dreadful velcro shoes at the bottom. What has happened to us?

I like Flashman, they should make movies off those books.

I added "scunnered" to my lexicon.

Fraser was always an old grumbler and complainer and nostalgist. His book on his experiences in Burma was interesting as a war memoir, but his ranting about modern affairs made parts of it almost unreadable. I found his nonsense about post-traumatic stress to be particularly ignorant: he claims the stiff-upper-belipped British soldier never suffered from it; at about the same time I read a book by a local man who waded through much worse during the war than Fraser who claims it was quite common. The Flashman series is wonderful and I wish I had read it when I was younger, but Fraser himself seemed to personify the cranky old Englishman (Lowland Scot?) with lots of complaints but no solutions other than to wind the clock back to some imagined past nirvana. Unappealing fellow, in my opinion.

Last edited by Big Tony (2011-05-11 16:24:19)

England = fail

Amusingly, when the "first packet of the Flashman Papers" was published, some reviewers, I seem to recall, thought it was an authentic 19th century memoir! Just shows you the gullibility of educated people. It reminds me a bit of the flap over "The Education of Little Tree," which purported to be the memoirs of a half-Cherokee boy who was raised by his Cherokee grandparents in the 1930s. It was an obvious work of fiction, but again, many people thought it was the straight goods, and it became enormously popular in American schools for quite awhile. Eventually, it turned out that the writer was a white man. Moreover, he had been a Knight of the Ku Klux Klan and a speechwriter for George C. Wallace not too many years before he wrote "Little Tree." I found the whole business hilarious.