Flashman

"I have always been really interested in the 19th century and these books put a lot of it in context for me. They are brilliantly written and excellently researched. Flashman is a character whom George McDonald Fraser takes on from the moment he is expelled from Tom Brown’s School, creating 12 fictional memories. For me, they really brought history to life. It introduced me to history from all over the world. Flashman was knocking around the whole of the British Empire, as well as in North America and the jungles of Madagascar. It gave me a useful insight into global history . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes I am sure they do. They are both so humorous and I am quite keen to inject humour into my history writing. Well I think if you interview people you get a much more intricate insight into what was going on. In Ireland I have interviewed a lot of people who remember the War of Independence here, and you get many different perspectives that you won’t get in a normal history book. You get the tiny minutiae of why things actually happened. Exactly, so when you get to the everyday life you realise that somebody reacted this way or that. Also, the whole point is that we are all affected by what our parents and grandparents did. For example, if you had a grandparent in the war that will affect how your parents were brought up, and in turn how you are brought up."