From The Times archives:

From: Henri Blowitz, Your esteemed Paris Correspondent

To: The Editor, The Times

It is with great pleasure that I, Henri Stefan Opper de Blowitz, greatest of all Times correspondents, write to inform you that I have recruited to the Paris staff a most remarkable personage. His name is Harry Flashman.

George MacDonald Fraser

Author of dashing period novels which became a cult among young and old with their caddish anti-hero, Flashman

BACKGROUND

• Flashman author loses his final battle

• Flashman and the Man from The Times

• Flashman of The Times

• Lives Remembered: George MacDonald Fraser and Sir Nicholas Pumfrey

• Audiobooks: Flashman Papers

This fellow is vain, deceitful, devilishly attractive, caddish, cowardly and entirely without scruples. He is, in short, very similar to me (though his side whiskers are footling côtelettes d’agneau compared with my fine mutton chops) and I feel sure that he will make an excellent journalist.

I first met the blighter hiding under a barrel during the Siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. That night, during a splendid party at the palace, he won my admiration by tupping, in a broom cupboard, no less a beauty than the Empress Consort of France, MarÍa Eugenia Ignacia Agustina Guzmán y Montijo, the wife of Napoleon III. He proclaimed her “a fine filly for a gallop”. We drank an immoderate quantity of champagne. You may recall the expenses claim.

Flashman and I have been friends ever since. You will remember that Bismarck (that old tub of phlegm) used to lift up the tablecloth at conferences “to see if Blowitz is not underneath”. I am now too fat to hide under tables, but Flashman is not, so I have recruited him for a job at the Congress in Berlin, when I plan to execute another of my “scoops”, by revealing the contents of the treaty before it is signed. P.S. At dinner last night, Flashman stole my silver fob watch. I enclose a bill for its replacement.