Tom Brown’s School Days and Flashman. Thomas Smart Hughes

The first in George MacDonald Fraser’s uproarious Flashman series and the classic they pay homage to available together for the first time in ebook format.Uproarious, nefarious and sociable at the same time, Tom Brown is at once the typical boy of his generation and the perennial hero. Tom Brown’s School Days charts our protagonist’s time at Rugby, taking his troubled adolescence when he is savagely bullied by the brutal Flashman, to his departure – with the world at his feet.In Flashman, meanwhile, George MacDonald Fraser’s inspired spin-off from Hughes’ classic, we see Brown’s tormentor from an entirely different perspective. Expelled from Rugby for drunkenness, and none too welcome at home after seducing his father’s mistress, the young Flashman embarks on a military career with Lord Cardigan’s Hussars.En route to Afghanistan, our hero hones his skills as a soldier, duellist, imposter, coward and amorist (mastering all 97 ways of Hindu love-making during a brief sojourn in Calcutta), before being pressed into reluctant service as a secret agent. His Afghan adventures culminate in a starring role in that great historic disaster, the Retreat from Kabul.