George MacDonald Fraser Biography

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British novelist, born in Carlisle, educated at Carlisle Grammar School and Glasgow Academy. He began working as a newspaper reporter in 1949 and was deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald from 1964 to 1969. Flashman (1969) was the first of a long succession of entertainingly eventful novels recounting the military career of the eponymous bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays; subsequent titles include Flash for Freedom (1971). Flashman in the Great Game (1975), Flashman and the Mountain of Light (1990), and Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994). Among his other works of fiction are the short-stories in The General Danced at Dawn (1970) and the novel McAuslan in the Rough (1974), both of which form spirited evocations of life in a highland regiment. Fraser's other publications include a history of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers entitled The Steel Bonnets (1971), and Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), a memoir of his experiences in Burma during the Second World War.