George MacDonald Fraser obituaries

Novelist and scriptwriter George MacDonald Fraser has died at the age of 82. The creator of the Flashman novels also wrote numerous screenplays including Octopussy (with Richard Maibaum & Michael G. Wilson, based on the stories by Ian Fleming).

There are obituaries in all the major newspapers including The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times and The Independent .

It needed only a few moments exposure to one of his reminiscing public performances to establish that George MacDonald Fraser had led quite a life. His experiences included being held upside down by his heels, while strafed by Japanese sniper fire, as he foraged for water during the Burma Campaign of the Second World War, basking in the admiration of Charlie Chaplin and worrying about whether Burt Lancaster disliked his film scripts. Posterity, on the other hand, will remember him for a single achievement. This was the creation, or rather the re-creation, of Harry Flashman, originally the villain of Thomas Hughes's Victorian morality tale Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), but remodelled, under MacDonald Fraser's expert grasp, into the star of a dozen books that changed the face of British historical fiction.