We didn’t, as it happens, get off to the smoothest start. Who wouldn’t want to meet their literary hero? I did not know it at the time, of course, but it would be the last interview that MacDonald Fraser gave before his death in January 2008. In 2006, shortly before the publication of my own Victoria’s Wars, I was asked by the Daily Telegraph to interview George MacDonald Fraser who had just brought out his twelfth and last Flashman novel, Flashman on the March, set during the Abyssinian Campaign of 1868. Hence the first eponymously titled Flashman is set in Afghanistan, with our cowardly hero somehow emerging from the disastrous Retreat from Kabul with his reputation enhanced.

Flashman is expelled from Rugby at about the same time Queen Victoria comes to the throne and the ill-fated First Afghan War begins. Tiring of journalism in the mid-1960s (he was assistant editor of the Glasgow Herald), he decided to use Hughes’ creation as the anti-hero in his own Victorian adventure story. MacDonald Fraser had read Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a bestselling Victorian novel, as a boy and immediately recognized the drunken bully Flashman as the unacknowledged ‘star’ of the book.

The books became the literary inspiration for my own four histories ( The Homicidal Earl, The Indian Mutiny, Zulu, Victoria’s Wars) and two historical novels ( Zulu Hart and Hart of Empire) on the same subject. I read them in my teens and was immediately captivated by MacDonald Fraser’s colourful depiction of Victorian warfare. But for George MacDonald Fraser and his wonderfully funny – and, to modern eyes, decidedly un-PC – Harry Flashman novels, I would not have become a historian.

George macdonald fraser books