A Few Words on George McDonald Fraser

Well - in the continuing, ever more mysterious absence of The Master (whom I now envisage entirely encased in a plaster cast with his outspread limbs attached to winches, while saucy nurses scurry around and Sir Lancelot Spratt sweeps though the ward), I had better say a few words about the death of George McDonald Fraser (whom The Master no doubt interviewed). The strange picture that goes with that BBC News story recalls one of many amusing Fraser documentaries and interviews, in which he would delight in making his interlocutor blench with the violence of his reactionary views (in TV profiles, they'd mostly end up on the cutting room floor). I've read a few of the Flashman novels over the years, admiringly, but never became hooked. The book of his I most cherish is his memoir of fighting through Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here - vivid, moving, truthful and gloriously 'incorrect', it is, in its way, a great book, which I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't come across it.