Оглавление
George Fraser MacDonald. Flashman and the Tiger: And Other Extracts from the Flashman Papers
Copyright
How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?
Dedication
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
EXPLANATORY NOTE
APPENDIX. The Emperor Franz-Josef (1830–1916) and Empress Elisabeth (1837–1898)
NOTES
APPENDIX
NOTES
Discover the first book in The Flashman Papers, with …
FOOTNOTES
About the Author
The FLASHMAN Papers (In chronological order)
The FLASHMAN Papers (In order of publication)
Also by George MacDonald Fraser
Short Stories
History
Autobiography
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
The following piece was found in the author’s study in 2013 by the Estate of George MacDonald Fraser.
‘How did you get the idea of Flashman?’ and ‘When are we going to get his U.S. Civil War memoirs?’ are questions which I have ducked more often than I can count. To the second, my invariable response is ‘Oh, one of these days’. Followed, when the inquirer is an impatient American, by the gentle reminder that to an old British soldier like Flashman the unpleasantness between the States is not quite the most important event of the nineteenth century, but rather a sideshow compared to the Mutiny or Crimea. Before they can get indignant I add hastily that his Civil War itinerary is already mapped out; this is the only way of preventing them from telling me what it ought to be.
.....
Well, if I’d had any sense, or an inkling of what lay years ahead, or been less flown with Voisin’s arrack, I’d have given the business the go-by – but you know me: the promise of that photograph, and the thought of dear Otto smashing the chandelier in his wrath, were too much for my ardent boyish nature. And it never hurts to do the press a good turn.
So it was with a light heart and my hat on three hairs that I found myself strolling under the famous lime trees to the Brandenburg Thor a few weeks later, taking a long slant at the Thier Garten in the June sunshine, and marvelling at the Valkyrian proportions of German women – which awoke memories of my youthful grapplings with that blubbery baroness in Munich … Pech-something, her name was, a great whale of a woman with an appetite to match.
.....
