Buy this book on-line FRASER**, GEORGE MACDONALD - Edited and Arranged by: : Flashman and the Dragon - From the Flashman Papers,1860LONDON.COLLINS HARVILL,1985. ISBN 0002712458.
UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn.FINE/FINE.No owner inscrptn but price-clip to dw/dj.Bright,crisp, clean,glossy laminated,wrap-around colour pictorial artwork by 'barbosa',illustrated dw/dj with b/w lettering; with negligible shelf-wear or creasing to edges and corners - no nicks or tears present.Top+fore-edges bright and clean; contents bright,tight,clean,solid and sound - pristine - no dog-ear reading creases to any pages' corners,appears unread - apart from my own collation.Publisher's bright,crisp,clean, sharp- cornered,original plain red cloth boards with bright,crisp,blocked gilt letters to spine/ backstrip,and immaculate b/w map illustrated endpapers.UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn,7-320pp [paginated] includes an author explanatory note, pp9 to pp292 story without numbered chapters, appendices (I-III),a glossary,notes (1-45); plus [unpaginated] half-title+title pages and a dedication.
"When all other trusts fail,turn to Flashman". - Abraham Lincoln.
Unfortunately a lot of people did,in China in 1860,presumably because they knew no better. There was the lovely daughter of the Vicarage, desperate to sell her cargo of opium up the Pearl River: the British Minister who needed a daring agent to penetrate to the heart of the terrible Taiping rebellion: the Emperor's ravishing concubine,seeking a champion in her struggle for power in the tottering Manchu empire: Lord Elgin,in search of an intelligence chief for his perilous mission to Peking: SzuZhan,the female bandit Colossus,who had mislaid five husbands and was casting about for a sixth. . .
To each of these optimists,handsome Harry Flashman,with his heroic honours and cavalry whiskers thick upon him,looked like the answer to a prayer.How were they to know that behind the Victoria Cross on his manly breast fluttered the faintest heart in the British Army,or that all his gallantry and charm masked a nature from which Machiavelli,Casanova,and Dick Turpin would have recoiled with cries of dismay?* As it was,they took debonair Flash Harry at his face value,and he took them for everything he could,while he and China trembled through the bloodiest Civil War in history,and the British and French armies fought their way to the gates of the Forbidden City.
'Flashman and the Dragon' is the 8th memoir of the arch-cad,toady and bully of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' grown into inglorious manhood,whose deplorable reminiscences have already won him countless admirers all over the world.In it he flies with furtive haste from the decks of opium-runners to the councils of statesmen and the harem of a mad monarch,from pirate ambush to desperate intrigue in the nightmare Kingdom of Heavenly Peace,from battle,boudoir,and torture-chamber to the dream-world of the Summer Palace, encountering warlords,mercenaries,smugglers, rebels,fanatics,brigands,and a breath-taking succession of those dangerous beauties for whom the great bounder had such a fatal attraction.
As he runs,lies,skulks,and grovels in his finest style,scrambling to safety over friend and foe alike,old Flashy still has time to cast his cynical and scrupously accurate eye over the passing turmoil,illuminating yet another almost forgotten chapter of Victorian history,when the strangest of all revolutions convulsed an ancient empire and the western barbarians set out to tame the Dragon and all unwittingly helped to waken it to life.
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