I do not understand why you cannot just read a book, listen to music, visit museums and so on just for the pure bloody enjoyment of it. The Flashman books are enjoyable escapism pure and simple. Think no more than that. The author is a Fellow in Philosophy I see. How many people buy his books I wonder? 600 pages of turgid prose. I used to select (gulp and therefore had to read) financial books for a US university and my goodness those 1,000 page books are dull. Give me 220 pages of Flashy any day of the week.

The writer, MacDonald-Fraser’s book of his time in the war against the Ja*s in Burma, as he called them – (this dainty writer likely found that offensive too) – but his book of his account of fighting across Burma, ‘Quartered Safe Out Here‘ is a Must Read for everyone. It is widely regarded as one of the best First Person stories of life lived in combat. And as I say – everyone should read it because it is so out of our experience, but is such a part of the human expierence. We all know of WWII, but this gives the story from the foot solider – and it is upbeat, great read, and really good.

Kipling

”You may talk o’ gin and beer   
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,   
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter   
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.   
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,   
Where I used to spend my time   
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,   
Of all them blac* faced crew   
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din, ”

I liked MacDonald-Fraser’s MacAuslan books too – comedy of ‘the dirtiest solder in HM Army’, but dirty as in unwashed, incompetent, drunk, tardy, – not in the Flashman vein, not a cad or mean – just an immovable force of sloth and incompetence – like the American ‘Sad Sack’ solider, or the Fantastic WWI character which is a light, yet dark, comedy of a lost cause solider of WWI and was very popular, a military classic of its day.

‘The Good Soldier Švejk [a] ( pronounced [ˈʃvɛjk]) is an unfinished satirical dark comedy novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, published in 1921-1923,’

A solider of dry, even dark, incompetent comedy from all three armies and wars showing an archetype of what all goes into the sausage grinder of conscription – that are forever the albatross around a young Lieutenant’s neck….and used to show the other side of war. the one exemplified by the old Army acronyms of FUBAR and SNAFU… haha, life. You can be sure some of them marched in Caesar’s armies too….

And as far as this article….. the word snowflake hovers over it like smoke from Winston’s cigar….

The final book Flashman on the March was written and published after the Iraq Invasion and has a rather pointed author’s note (grabbed from a google for it): “Flashman’s story is about a British army sent out in a good and honest cause by a government who knew what honour meant. (…) It went with the doubt that it was right. It served no politician’s vanity or interest. It went without messianic rhetoric. There were no false excuses, no deceits, no cover-ups or lies, just a decent resolve to do a government’s first duty: to protect its people, whatever the cost. To quote Flashman again, those were the days.”

A shout-out to GMF for the Flashman books’ excellent history lessons, and for keeping the pretence and style consistent over the series. A highly competent job!

Nikhil Krishman seems to favor sensitivity readers sticking fingers into the creative process before the editor gets in her last licks.You can’t have too many eyes scouring manuscripts for bits conceivably hurtful to the unwary book buyer coming upon them. No one must be given offense, especially the easily offended with access to one of the countless Twitter mobs that police behavior today. So rollicking adventure stories like George MacDonald Fraser wrote won’t be countenanced by the puritanical left that captured the published industry years ago. They offend too many modern-day sacred cows, to use a phrase that itself will be suppressed one day unless used with all due deference to its sacral roots . Projecting today’s cleansing moral values backward in time will deform popular and even serious literature and rob them of their savour and verisimilitude. Nobody will read them without yawns at their moral correctness, a problem already seen today. The Booker-prize winners generally speaking are a way of saying to readers pass on by, nothing to see here except angst or some form of victimhood.

No doubt in 100 years some writer will start a “Wokeman” series about a woke lefty that shows up at every lefty disaster from 1900 to 2100. I suggest that the first book should be titled “Wokeman and the Mountain of Skulls.”

“We live in a world where we are constantly exercised by the problem of complicity. We wonder: am I complicit in climate change because I just put on the washing machine?”

Yes! And with the effective altruists gaining traction with their million year horizon of ethical decision-making, escapism seems all the more imperative.

I might dip into my E E Doc Smith Lensman series and imagine myself in a more manageable moral universe!

The impression received from this writer is that he largely abhors the Flashman books by GMF, which I haven’t read, but am coincidentally about to start reading “Quartered Safe out Here” following that other fascinating WW2 memoir by Fitzroy Maclean “Eastern Approaches”. I also comprehend that he regards the concept of colonialism with equal disdain. He is of course entitled to his opinion, and most of us would question some of our nation’s past history, including aspects of our colonial record, though there are those who quite legitimately point out that there were benefits to be had (not least the banning of the practice of suttee), even occasionally admitted by those in receipt of some of our better habits, amazingly our once efficient Civil Service.
Other nations who also engaged in colonialism in the same centuries we were, also conferred mixed blessings upon the nations they colonised. Their impact was in some cases infinitely more damaging than the British, the Belgian Congo being one. There were also, before the arrival of the British in India, successive waves of invaders who came down from the North subjugating previous incomers. I wouldn’t dream of insulting the author by asking his background, but it seems fairly safe that his name gives an indication that some of his antecedents sprang from the Indian subcontinent.
The “British” tribes occupying Britannia when the Romans arrived would have quite virulently denied any advantages of the Roman occupation. After all, what did the Romans do for us? They did at least eventually leave us to our own devices as the dark ages ensued. And then there are the waves of Vikings from Scandinavia, and their successors the Normans. I’m English, and from what I know of my grandparents background on both maternal and paternal sides almost certainly from peasant stock a few generations further back, but there’s no knowing whether my genes indicate whether I started here, or arrived as a surf with an invading wave.
Before I’m accused of whataboutery, my point is that not many of us from any continent or island worldwide, can legitimately claim historical innocence from the “colonial” tendancies or straightforward powermongering sins of our ancestors. I accept that it seems a worldwide occupation at present to bash the Brits, but I’ve reached the point where my response is now, so what? Tell me what you did for the people your ancestors colonised in your past history.

Seems the majority of snarky comments on this article are from people who didn’t actually read it or failed to understand it, since their assertions of the author’s point are completely wrong. If your conclusion is that the author is somehow -for- the moral censorship of books, then I’m talking about you.

Well, I’m no fan of empire, any empire.
But as soon as art tries to be ethical, it fails as art.
Camus once said that “nothing is true that forces one to exclude”.
There is a role for politics, and ethics, and propaganda, etc, but for god’s sake keep them well away from literature.

If there is one thing worse than the racist-sexist-homophobia of popular novelists it is the bottomless conceit of your average “Fellow in Philosophy at Robinson College, Cambridge.”
But I wonder which is worse: the imperial colonialism of the Flashmans of the world and their military and political masters? Or maybe the cultural colonialism of wokey academics and their academic and “effective altruist” paymasters.

The cardinal sin for an author is to be boring. And that GMF most definitely is not.
Like all art, ideologically correct writing – whatever the ideology catered to – is inevitably boring: One-dimensional, schematic, and predictable. Dante’s “Inferno” is read with enjoyment; “Paradiso” is boring.

Meanwhile leftist “celebrities”, moist of eye and with trembling lower lips seek to guilt-trip us about the war in Yemen.

This is a multi-sided civil war, primarily a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Its cause is largely incomprehensible to Western thinking, which has left religious conflict far behind it.

Why is it our problem? Why can these hypocrites not call it by its name, that Muslims hate each other and fight fir that reasons?

The man was on Officer in ” The Cherry Pickers” The 11th Hussars, now called the Kings Royal Hussars, and they would be no different today… not that the author would have ever been in any social circle that would ever have met one…

I had to read this twice to discern what the author intended to convey, and concluded that I agreed with him that works such as the Flashman novels can contribute to the complicated history of British imperialism, despite the occasional assumption with which I would quibble.
For example, “The callous stupidity of leaders, both military and civilian, is Flashman’s great bugbear” may well be true, but such callous stupidity is recognizable in British leaders of today, in competing empires of those times, and in the leaders of colonies following independence. Some of these have governed themselves well since independence, others, not so well.
Anyone who considers these books ‘problematic’ need not read them. I reject utterly their right to prevent me from doing so. The modern campaign for censorship is appalling.

Well I think many of the commenters are rather negatively misinterpreting this article. It’s an insightful exposition about the journey of writing adventure stories about empire and enjoying these regardless of the moral issues.

Good piece, Fraser was great writer and deserves the academic defence offered here. Flash for Freedom (third in the series) is an unsparing account of the transatlantic slave trade in its entirety. It’s also hugely entertaining, and John Charity Spring is surely Fraser’s most inspired villain. The scene in the slavers cart, referenced by the article, is packed with insight. I was first advised to read Fraser by my history teacher in 1972 (Royal Flash for background to the Schleswig Holstein question) and reread them to this day.

He’s a Fellow at Cambridge: there is no more authoritative credential to define him, so none of the (negative) comments ought to be a surprise.

“Not every bureaucrat in Thirties Germany was the moral equivalent of a concentration camp guard.” I couldn’t agree more. Sadly, nuance and complexity seem to have gone out the window these days, which is particularly sad when it comes to the literary world, which used to offer something of a respite from over-simplistic thinking. That said, I believe that any “morally serious history” MUST “be neither simple nor humourless.” Moral seriousness requires thinking, not regurgitating.

My take on the Flashman Civil War adventures, which GMF had no intention of writing:- https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kings_Guard

If Tombs says it’s alright to return colonial artifacts in limited circumstances, is that permissible?

I’m always amused when apologists try to defend the benefits of empire!
“We are here to plunder your resources, murder and enslave your men and rape your women – but don’t worry, here’s cricket and railways in return!”