Harry Flashman  Sir Harry Paget Flashman is a fictional character created by Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) in the semi-autobiographical "Tom Brown's School Days" (1857) and later developed by George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008). Harry Flashman appears in a series of 12 of Fraser's books, collectively known as "The Flashman Papers", with covers illustrated by Arthur Barbosa. Flashman was played by Malcolm McDowell in the Richard Lester 1975 film "Royal Flash". In Hughes' 1857 book, Flashman (a relatively minor character) is portrayed as a notorious bully at Rugby School who persecutes Tom Brown, and who is finally expelled for drunkenness. Fraser decided to write Flashman's memoirs, in which the school bully would be identified with an "illustrious Victorian soldier" experiencing many 19th-century wars and adventures and rising to high rank in the British Army, acclaimed as a great soldier, while remaining "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady." Fraser's Flashman is an antihero who often runs from danger in the novels. Nevertheless, through a combination of luck and cunning, he usually ends each volume acclaimed as a hero. Fraser gave Flashman a lifespan from 1822 to 1915 and a birth-date of 5 May. Flashman's first and middle names were invented for the character as Hughes's novel does not give Flashman's first name. Fraser uses the names to make an ironic allusion to Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, one of the heroes of Waterloo, who cuckolded the Duke of Wellington's brother Henry Wellesley and later—in one of the period's more celebrated scandals—married Wellesley's ex-wife. In "Flashman", Flashman says that his great-grandfather, Jack Flashman, made the family fortune in America, trading in rum, slaves and "piracy too, I shouldn't wonder". Despite their wealth, the Flashmans "were never the thing": Flashman quotes the diarist Henry Greville's comment that "the coarse streak showed through, generation after generation, like dung beneath a rosebush". Harry Flashman's father, Henry Buckley Flashman, appears in "Black Ajax" (1997). Buckley, a bold young officer in the British cavalry, was wounded in action at Talavera in 1809. He then tried to get into "society" by sponsoring bare-knuckle boxer Tom Molineaux (the first black man to contend for a championship) and subsequently married Flashman's mother Lady Alicia Paget, a fictional relation of the real Marquess of Anglesey.