What makes a hero?

‘Flashman’s just a monster,’ says George MacDonald Fraser. ‘He’s extremely unpleasant but he knows how to present a front to the world, and at least he’s honest about himself. But that was because he assumed that his memoirs would never be published.’

I’d just been putting to the author of the Flashman novels the theory of this magazine’s editor: that far from being a scoundrel, Flashman — the fag-roasting rotter thrown out of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays only to pop up in the great historic moments of the Victorian age — was in fact the toppest of eggs; an accidental hero who’s actually the genuine article because he at least admits to his flaws.

‘It’s usually my female readers who write and say that,’ Fraser says in his perfectly modulated Miss-Jean-Brodie-goes-to-Glasgow vowels, unflattened by 35 years as a tax exile on the Isle of Man, ‘— that he’s actually a very modest hero who makes himself out to be a coward and a cad.