I just ran across this review of the Flashman ouerve in Vanity Fair by Chis Hitchings
www.vanityfair.com/commen...o03?page=1
Scoundrel Time
Part James Bond, part Bertie Wooster, Flashman has whored, drunk, and weaseled his way through 12 adventures set in British imperial times. As Flashy's creator, George MacDonald Fraser, enters his 80s, his addictive brew of fact and fiction points up the dangers of "the Great Game" that now ensnares America
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In the last but one of his 12 novelistic gallops through history and imagination, Flashman and the Tiger, George MacDonald Fraser does something at least as daring as anything that his poltroonish hero has ever ventured. He inserts his main character smack-dab into the middle of a failed assassination attempt. Colonel John Sebastian Moran, a pitiless killer and big-game hunter, is drawing a bead from a window in London at a silhouette across the ghostly street. And just as old Flashy is drawing his own bead on Moran, there is a wild commotion when an austere, gaunt private detective, a bluff old physician, and a squad of bobbies come piling into the room.
Some of you will have seen this coming: it is the climactic moment of "The Adventure of the Empty House," the momentous story in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle recalled Sherlock Holmes from the dead and then saved him from the bullet of Professor Moriarty's vile associate. In other words, Fraser has succeeded not just in making his creation the familiar Zelig of high-Victorian imperial history, but in giving him a cameo part in late-Victorian fiction as well. Flashman is everywhere. And why should this not be so? Tourists visit Baker Street every day to see where Sherlock Holmes "actually" lived and pondered, shooting cocaine and sharing rooms with a chap. (That was in 221B, which never existed.) George MacDonald Fraser has never claimed to be anything but the editor of the "Flashman papers," discovered by luck during an auction at an English country house. When the first "packet" of papers was published, in 1969, several well-gulled reviewers genuinely hailed it as a grand literary discovery (one of them going as far as to say that there had been nothing like it since the unearthing of Boswell's diaries). It is the deftest borrowing since Tom Stoppard helped himself to the walk-on parts of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
George MacDonald Fraser was 80 on his last birthday ("same day as Charlemagne, Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, and Kenneth Tynan," as he tells me) and is celebrating the publication of a round dozen of edited Flashman papers. I dip my colors in a solemn salute. It makes me whistle when I think how I grabbed the first of his published efforts right off the bat in 1969. Even now I can tell a fellow addict at 10 paces. Those of us who have tried to cover the new "Great Game" as it has unfolded on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have forgathered in Flashman's Hotel, situated in the Pakistani Army's post-colonial garrison town of Rawalpindi, and in the Flashman Restaurant of the Gandamack Lodge, in Kabul (Gandamack Lodge being old Flashy's ill-gotten mansion in rural Leicestershire). These are places where the borders are "porous," as the newspapers like to say, but where the boundary between fact and fiction is the most porous of all. It is Fraser's huge achievement to have smuggled his main man across that frontier, in both directions.
Victorian empire ("the greatest thing that ever happened to an undeserving world," Fraser asserts) was largely dedicated to Lord Macaulay's belief in progress and improvement: a civilizing mission that would gradually spread light into the dark places of the earth. It involved the Whig theory of history and was supposed to operate according to a near-providential plan. Well, that's all balls for a start, as Flashman stoutly observes: "In my experience the course of history is as often settled by someone's having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside."
In a wayand there's no shame in thisFraser works according to a formula. There is, in every Flashman story, a horrific villain, a brush with an unthinkably agonizing death, and a bodacious female. Pure Ian Fleming, you might murmur, and indeed Fraser himself was a screenwriter for Octopussy. Why read the James Bond series if not for the certainty of being transported into a reliable parallel universe where there is no Goldfinger without a corresponding Pussy Galore? Ah, but the men Flashman vanquishes, and the women he tumbles, are for the most part "real." And so are the events depicted. Fleming on his best day would never have dared match James Bond with the modern equivalent of Otto von Bismarck or send him into the sack with Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, let alone have succeeded in making it so believable that some readers still do truly believe it. (When Flashman sees Oscar Wilde at the theater, in the course of his authored but unauthorized invasion of that Sherlock Holmes story, and marvelously describes the poet of decadence as resembling "an overfed trout in a toup," we can hear his crusty, clubland grunt.)
But, on the other hand, James Bond did have a license to kill, and a thirst to employ it, whereas Flashman is a cowering impostor who prefers whoring and bullying to any risking of his skin on the thin red line. Thus, every novel must begin with a mise en scne that shows not just history as a chapter of screwups and screwings but also Flashman's own participation as an unlucky accident. The antihero doesn't begin by calling coolly on "M" to be briefed on his latest lethal assignment. He begins by running away in the wrong direction. So, to the drama of Bond, Fraser brilliantly adds the absurdity of Bertie Wooster. When Fraser first ushered his Homeric duffer onto the stage, P. G. Wodehouse was tempted into a rare comment, saying, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."
Well, just as Wodehouse could have quoted the whole of that Keats poem with ease, one imagines that Flashman (or his creator) knows better in the 12th and latest novel, Flashman on the March, when he remarks that the British government is caught "between Scylla and t'other thing." This is Wooster to the life, half remembering something from the schoolroom until corrected by Jeeves. As Bertie ruefully phrases it, never learning from his mistakes, it is just when you are stepping high and confident that Fate waits behind the door with a stuffed eelskin. And here goes old Flashy:
My spirits were rising as we set off down the bank, the birds were carolling, there was a perfumed breeze blowing from the water, we were within a few miles of journey's end, I was absolutely humming 'Drink, Puppy, Drink,' the larks and snails were no doubt on their respective wings and thorns, God was in his heaven, and on the verge of the jungle, not twenty yards away, a white-robed helmeted lancer was sitting his horse, watching us.
Or as Bertie inquires in The Code of the Woosters:
"But the larks, Jeeves? The snails? I'm pretty sure larks and snails entered into it."
"I am coming to the larks and snails, sir. 'The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn'"
"Now you're talking. And the tab line?"
"'God's in His heaven, all's right with the world.'"
"That's it in a nutshell. I couldn't have put it better myself."
Instead of Aunt Agatha, Fraser has placed a sinister and armed horseman at the terminus of his idyll, but then, Raymond Chandler (an old schoolmate of Wodehouse's at Dulwich College) made it a maxim that when action was flagging you could always have a man enter the room carrying a gun.
To say that Fraser can so easily juggle Conan Doyle and Holmes, Fleming and Bond, Wodehouse and Wooster, and Chandler and Marlowe is, I hope, to offer reasonably high praise. But just to pile on the admiration for a bit, I know some eminent historians who have pored over Fraser's footnotes and appreciated details about, say, the Charge of the Light Brigade that are known to few. The battle scene at Balaklava is meticulously done, and if his own mad charge is started by Flashman himself, who panics his horse by farting so loudly with sheer hangover and pure fear, why then it's hardly less of a fiasco and a shambles than the real thing turned out to be.
I am not looking for faults after all this drooling on my part, but there is one problem that needs to be faced squarely. In the earlier stories, Flashman is a sadist and a brute as well as a rascally coward and goof-off. He takes positive, gleeful pleasure in the misfortunes of others, especially if he can turn those misfortunes to his own account. In the very first book, he tells us, within months of joining his first regiment, "Myself, I liked a good flogging, and used to have bets with Bryant, my particular crony, on whether the man would cry out before the tenth stroke, or when he would faint. It was better sport than most, anyway." Some volumes later, in Flash for Freedom!, he is on the Mississippi and running away with the beautiful slave girl Cassy, who has been his bedmate and his companion in adversity. The brutal slave-catchers corner them, and she is "quivering like a hunted beast." Our hearts are in our mouths as he ponders what to do.
"Cassy!" I snapped. "Can you use a gun?"
She nodded. "Take this, then," says I. "Cover themand if one of them stirs a finger, shoot the swine in the stomach! Therecatch hold. Good girl, good girlI'll be back in an instant!"
"What is it?" Her eyes were wild. "Where are you"
"Don't ask questions! Trust me!" And with that I slipped out of the door, pulled it to, and was off like a stung whippet. I'd make quarter of a mile, maybe more, before she would twig, or they overpowered her.
This gave new significance to the old phrase "self-preservation." All you needed, in order to anticipate old Flashy's moves, was to guess at the lowest possible motive. And then, unaccountably, our hero started to go soft. In Flashman and the Dragon, he is the captive of the sinuous Chinese courtesan Yehonala:
When two of her eunuchs caught some crows and released them with firecrackers tied to their legs so that the birds were blown to bits in mid-air, Yehonala had the culprits' backsides cut to bloody pulp with bamboo whips, watching the infliction of the full hundred strokes with smiling enjoyment. You may say they deserved a drubbing, but you didn't see it.
The earlier Flashman would (a) not have thought the cruel eunuchs "deserved a drubbing" for their ingenuity, and (b) not have given a damn about their punishment. He would have relished both scenes. Deplorable signs of weakness were already evident in Flashman's Lady, where he burdened himself with a white woman while trying to escape the horrifying soldiers of Queen Ranavalona. On that occasion the inconvenient lady was also his wife, so conceivably an exception can be made. But by the time of Flashman and the Tiger the plain fact had to be faced: the old boy had gone positively mushy with emotion and was prepared to risk his own skinhis own skin, mark youto save his granddaughter's honor. There was some muttering in the ranks of the fan base. One blushed to see the pitiful wreck of what had once been such an ignoble man. It is therefore a real pleasure to be able to record a corking return to form in the latest book. Flashman has been chivied all over Abyssinia and saved repeatedly by the exquisite Uliba, an African princess who has acted as his guide, protector, and lover. There comes the moment, however, when their canoe has been swamped, the deadly waterfall is just ahead, Flashman has contrived to catch hold of an overhanging bough, and she has managed to seize one of his legs. As he reflects,
There was only one thing to be done, so I did it, drawing up my free leg and driving my foot down with all my force at Uliba's face staring up at me open-mouthed, half-submerged as she clung to my other knee. I missed, but caught her full on the shoulder, jarring her grip free, and away she went, canoe and all, the gunwale rasping against my legs as it was whirled downstream. One glimpse I had of the white water foaming over those long beautiful legs, and then she was gone.
Now, that, you will have to admit, is a damn sight more like it. "Yes," sighs Fraser, "a lot of readers thought he was going soft, or even getting braver. In fact, he can only display the courage of a cornered rat. And my daughter Caroshe's also a novelisttold me how delighted she was that this time he'd definitely turned nasty again."
Historians and critics will never stop arguing about the worthwhileness of it all: that amazing conquest and settlement of the known globe by the aristocrats and peasants of a rain-sodden archipelago in the North Sea. Fraser makes Flashman face it in all its squalor and grandeur: the British-owned slave ships, and the British vessels that put down the slave trade; the destruction of dens of tyranny in India and Abyssinia, and the hideous vandalizing of the Summer Palace in Peking; the serf armies and pirate navies that needed crushing, and the magnificent peoplesZulus, Sikhs, Afghanswho the British had finally to admit were unconquerable. The empire on which the sun never set was also the empire on which the gore never dried. Only a few decades ago, when the Flashman papers were first unwrapped from their oilskin, all this seemed to have vanished like blood off a bayonet. But now British and American soldiers are back in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia, and George MacDonald Fraser, who is known as a curmudgeonly Tory war veteran and staunch hater of Tony Blair, is not best pleased. "Tony Blair," he snorts down the phone, "is not just the worst prime minister we've ever had, but by far the worst prime minister we've ever had. It makes my blood boil to think of the British soldiers who've died for that little liar." Even so, in Flashman on the March, he ends his footnotes on the Abyssinian campaign ambiguously by noting that, although the British overthrew a crazed despot and then withdrew, "if Britain had stayed, revisionist historians would certainly have condemned it as another act of selfish imperialism."
This is the morally fraught terrain, between the first sound of the bugle and the news of triumph or disgrace, which it takes a serious man to cover, whether saddled on a mettlesome charger or flourishing only a pen. And, since history is often recounted by the victors, why not have it related for once by one who is something worse than a loser? Imagine if King Hal had kept Falstaff on hand as his bosom chum until the eve of Agincourt and you have a sense of Flashy's imperishable achievement.
Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens's latest book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, is part of the HarperCollins Eminent Lives series. His collection Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays was published in 2004 by Nation Books.
www.vanityfair.com/commen...o03?page=1
Scoundrel Time
Part James Bond, part Bertie Wooster, Flashman has whored, drunk, and weaseled his way through 12 adventures set in British imperial times. As Flashy's creator, George MacDonald Fraser, enters his 80s, his addictive brew of fact and fiction points up the dangers of "the Great Game" that now ensnares America
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
In the last but one of his 12 novelistic gallops through history and imagination, Flashman and the Tiger, George MacDonald Fraser does something at least as daring as anything that his poltroonish hero has ever ventured. He inserts his main character smack-dab into the middle of a failed assassination attempt. Colonel John Sebastian Moran, a pitiless killer and big-game hunter, is drawing a bead from a window in London at a silhouette across the ghostly street. And just as old Flashy is drawing his own bead on Moran, there is a wild commotion when an austere, gaunt private detective, a bluff old physician, and a squad of bobbies come piling into the room.
Some of you will have seen this coming: it is the climactic moment of "The Adventure of the Empty House," the momentous story in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle recalled Sherlock Holmes from the dead and then saved him from the bullet of Professor Moriarty's vile associate. In other words, Fraser has succeeded not just in making his creation the familiar Zelig of high-Victorian imperial history, but in giving him a cameo part in late-Victorian fiction as well. Flashman is everywhere. And why should this not be so? Tourists visit Baker Street every day to see where Sherlock Holmes "actually" lived and pondered, shooting cocaine and sharing rooms with a chap. (That was in 221B, which never existed.) George MacDonald Fraser has never claimed to be anything but the editor of the "Flashman papers," discovered by luck during an auction at an English country house. When the first "packet" of papers was published, in 1969, several well-gulled reviewers genuinely hailed it as a grand literary discovery (one of them going as far as to say that there had been nothing like it since the unearthing of Boswell's diaries). It is the deftest borrowing since Tom Stoppard helped himself to the walk-on parts of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
George MacDonald Fraser was 80 on his last birthday ("same day as Charlemagne, Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, and Kenneth Tynan," as he tells me) and is celebrating the publication of a round dozen of edited Flashman papers. I dip my colors in a solemn salute. It makes me whistle when I think how I grabbed the first of his published efforts right off the bat in 1969. Even now I can tell a fellow addict at 10 paces. Those of us who have tried to cover the new "Great Game" as it has unfolded on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have forgathered in Flashman's Hotel, situated in the Pakistani Army's post-colonial garrison town of Rawalpindi, and in the Flashman Restaurant of the Gandamack Lodge, in Kabul (Gandamack Lodge being old Flashy's ill-gotten mansion in rural Leicestershire). These are places where the borders are "porous," as the newspapers like to say, but where the boundary between fact and fiction is the most porous of all. It is Fraser's huge achievement to have smuggled his main man across that frontier, in both directions.
Victorian empire ("the greatest thing that ever happened to an undeserving world," Fraser asserts) was largely dedicated to Lord Macaulay's belief in progress and improvement: a civilizing mission that would gradually spread light into the dark places of the earth. It involved the Whig theory of history and was supposed to operate according to a near-providential plan. Well, that's all balls for a start, as Flashman stoutly observes: "In my experience the course of history is as often settled by someone's having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside."
In a wayand there's no shame in thisFraser works according to a formula. There is, in every Flashman story, a horrific villain, a brush with an unthinkably agonizing death, and a bodacious female. Pure Ian Fleming, you might murmur, and indeed Fraser himself was a screenwriter for Octopussy. Why read the James Bond series if not for the certainty of being transported into a reliable parallel universe where there is no Goldfinger without a corresponding Pussy Galore? Ah, but the men Flashman vanquishes, and the women he tumbles, are for the most part "real." And so are the events depicted. Fleming on his best day would never have dared match James Bond with the modern equivalent of Otto von Bismarck or send him into the sack with Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, let alone have succeeded in making it so believable that some readers still do truly believe it. (When Flashman sees Oscar Wilde at the theater, in the course of his authored but unauthorized invasion of that Sherlock Holmes story, and marvelously describes the poet of decadence as resembling "an overfed trout in a toup," we can hear his crusty, clubland grunt.)
But, on the other hand, James Bond did have a license to kill, and a thirst to employ it, whereas Flashman is a cowering impostor who prefers whoring and bullying to any risking of his skin on the thin red line. Thus, every novel must begin with a mise en scne that shows not just history as a chapter of screwups and screwings but also Flashman's own participation as an unlucky accident. The antihero doesn't begin by calling coolly on "M" to be briefed on his latest lethal assignment. He begins by running away in the wrong direction. So, to the drama of Bond, Fraser brilliantly adds the absurdity of Bertie Wooster. When Fraser first ushered his Homeric duffer onto the stage, P. G. Wodehouse was tempted into a rare comment, saying, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."
Well, just as Wodehouse could have quoted the whole of that Keats poem with ease, one imagines that Flashman (or his creator) knows better in the 12th and latest novel, Flashman on the March, when he remarks that the British government is caught "between Scylla and t'other thing." This is Wooster to the life, half remembering something from the schoolroom until corrected by Jeeves. As Bertie ruefully phrases it, never learning from his mistakes, it is just when you are stepping high and confident that Fate waits behind the door with a stuffed eelskin. And here goes old Flashy:
My spirits were rising as we set off down the bank, the birds were carolling, there was a perfumed breeze blowing from the water, we were within a few miles of journey's end, I was absolutely humming 'Drink, Puppy, Drink,' the larks and snails were no doubt on their respective wings and thorns, God was in his heaven, and on the verge of the jungle, not twenty yards away, a white-robed helmeted lancer was sitting his horse, watching us.
Or as Bertie inquires in The Code of the Woosters:
"But the larks, Jeeves? The snails? I'm pretty sure larks and snails entered into it."
"I am coming to the larks and snails, sir. 'The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn'"
"Now you're talking. And the tab line?"
"'God's in His heaven, all's right with the world.'"
"That's it in a nutshell. I couldn't have put it better myself."
Instead of Aunt Agatha, Fraser has placed a sinister and armed horseman at the terminus of his idyll, but then, Raymond Chandler (an old schoolmate of Wodehouse's at Dulwich College) made it a maxim that when action was flagging you could always have a man enter the room carrying a gun.
To say that Fraser can so easily juggle Conan Doyle and Holmes, Fleming and Bond, Wodehouse and Wooster, and Chandler and Marlowe is, I hope, to offer reasonably high praise. But just to pile on the admiration for a bit, I know some eminent historians who have pored over Fraser's footnotes and appreciated details about, say, the Charge of the Light Brigade that are known to few. The battle scene at Balaklava is meticulously done, and if his own mad charge is started by Flashman himself, who panics his horse by farting so loudly with sheer hangover and pure fear, why then it's hardly less of a fiasco and a shambles than the real thing turned out to be.
I am not looking for faults after all this drooling on my part, but there is one problem that needs to be faced squarely. In the earlier stories, Flashman is a sadist and a brute as well as a rascally coward and goof-off. He takes positive, gleeful pleasure in the misfortunes of others, especially if he can turn those misfortunes to his own account. In the very first book, he tells us, within months of joining his first regiment, "Myself, I liked a good flogging, and used to have bets with Bryant, my particular crony, on whether the man would cry out before the tenth stroke, or when he would faint. It was better sport than most, anyway." Some volumes later, in Flash for Freedom!, he is on the Mississippi and running away with the beautiful slave girl Cassy, who has been his bedmate and his companion in adversity. The brutal slave-catchers corner them, and she is "quivering like a hunted beast." Our hearts are in our mouths as he ponders what to do.
"Cassy!" I snapped. "Can you use a gun?"
She nodded. "Take this, then," says I. "Cover themand if one of them stirs a finger, shoot the swine in the stomach! Therecatch hold. Good girl, good girlI'll be back in an instant!"
"What is it?" Her eyes were wild. "Where are you"
"Don't ask questions! Trust me!" And with that I slipped out of the door, pulled it to, and was off like a stung whippet. I'd make quarter of a mile, maybe more, before she would twig, or they overpowered her.
This gave new significance to the old phrase "self-preservation." All you needed, in order to anticipate old Flashy's moves, was to guess at the lowest possible motive. And then, unaccountably, our hero started to go soft. In Flashman and the Dragon, he is the captive of the sinuous Chinese courtesan Yehonala:
When two of her eunuchs caught some crows and released them with firecrackers tied to their legs so that the birds were blown to bits in mid-air, Yehonala had the culprits' backsides cut to bloody pulp with bamboo whips, watching the infliction of the full hundred strokes with smiling enjoyment. You may say they deserved a drubbing, but you didn't see it.
The earlier Flashman would (a) not have thought the cruel eunuchs "deserved a drubbing" for their ingenuity, and (b) not have given a damn about their punishment. He would have relished both scenes. Deplorable signs of weakness were already evident in Flashman's Lady, where he burdened himself with a white woman while trying to escape the horrifying soldiers of Queen Ranavalona. On that occasion the inconvenient lady was also his wife, so conceivably an exception can be made. But by the time of Flashman and the Tiger the plain fact had to be faced: the old boy had gone positively mushy with emotion and was prepared to risk his own skinhis own skin, mark youto save his granddaughter's honor. There was some muttering in the ranks of the fan base. One blushed to see the pitiful wreck of what had once been such an ignoble man. It is therefore a real pleasure to be able to record a corking return to form in the latest book. Flashman has been chivied all over Abyssinia and saved repeatedly by the exquisite Uliba, an African princess who has acted as his guide, protector, and lover. There comes the moment, however, when their canoe has been swamped, the deadly waterfall is just ahead, Flashman has contrived to catch hold of an overhanging bough, and she has managed to seize one of his legs. As he reflects,
There was only one thing to be done, so I did it, drawing up my free leg and driving my foot down with all my force at Uliba's face staring up at me open-mouthed, half-submerged as she clung to my other knee. I missed, but caught her full on the shoulder, jarring her grip free, and away she went, canoe and all, the gunwale rasping against my legs as it was whirled downstream. One glimpse I had of the white water foaming over those long beautiful legs, and then she was gone.
Now, that, you will have to admit, is a damn sight more like it. "Yes," sighs Fraser, "a lot of readers thought he was going soft, or even getting braver. In fact, he can only display the courage of a cornered rat. And my daughter Caroshe's also a novelisttold me how delighted she was that this time he'd definitely turned nasty again."
Historians and critics will never stop arguing about the worthwhileness of it all: that amazing conquest and settlement of the known globe by the aristocrats and peasants of a rain-sodden archipelago in the North Sea. Fraser makes Flashman face it in all its squalor and grandeur: the British-owned slave ships, and the British vessels that put down the slave trade; the destruction of dens of tyranny in India and Abyssinia, and the hideous vandalizing of the Summer Palace in Peking; the serf armies and pirate navies that needed crushing, and the magnificent peoplesZulus, Sikhs, Afghanswho the British had finally to admit were unconquerable. The empire on which the sun never set was also the empire on which the gore never dried. Only a few decades ago, when the Flashman papers were first unwrapped from their oilskin, all this seemed to have vanished like blood off a bayonet. But now British and American soldiers are back in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia, and George MacDonald Fraser, who is known as a curmudgeonly Tory war veteran and staunch hater of Tony Blair, is not best pleased. "Tony Blair," he snorts down the phone, "is not just the worst prime minister we've ever had, but by far the worst prime minister we've ever had. It makes my blood boil to think of the British soldiers who've died for that little liar." Even so, in Flashman on the March, he ends his footnotes on the Abyssinian campaign ambiguously by noting that, although the British overthrew a crazed despot and then withdrew, "if Britain had stayed, revisionist historians would certainly have condemned it as another act of selfish imperialism."
This is the morally fraught terrain, between the first sound of the bugle and the news of triumph or disgrace, which it takes a serious man to cover, whether saddled on a mettlesome charger or flourishing only a pen. And, since history is often recounted by the victors, why not have it related for once by one who is something worse than a loser? Imagine if King Hal had kept Falstaff on hand as his bosom chum until the eve of Agincourt and you have a sense of Flashy's imperishable achievement.
Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens's latest book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, is part of the HarperCollins Eminent Lives series. His collection Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays was published in 2004 by Nation Books.
