Three of George MacDonald Fraser’s hilarious novels in which that irrepressible rogue Harry Paget Flashman, self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward – ‘and, oh yes, a toady’ – recounts an almost incredible life-story. Romping his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling series of military and amorous adventures, the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays seldom fails to comes out on top. In Flashman the youthful hero, newly expelled from Rugby School and armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, beds and reluctantly weds the beautiful Elspeth and even more reluctantly takes part in the first Anglo-Afghan War, honing a remarkable talent for self-preservation. Flash for Freedom! finds him crewing on an African slave ship called the Balliol College, hiding in a New Orleans whorehouse, and fortuitously running into rising young American politician Abraham Lincoln. Flashman and the Great Game returns him to India and the world of Kim, where he spies for the British government, makes love to a ravishing but ruthless maharani and – despite spectacular acts of spinelessness – not only survives the bloodbath of the Sepoy Mutiny but emerges with a Victoria Cross and a knighthood. George MacDonald Fraser is a master of comedy and an unrivalled storyteller whose craft is matched only by his impeccable historical research.

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world. In his raunchiest romp yet, Flashman mines new depths of roguish behaviour as a secret agent extraordinaire and is thrust headfirst into the middle of the Indian Mutiny.

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world. Can a man be all bad? When Harry Flashman’s adventures as the reluctant secret agent in Afghanistan lead him to join the exclusive company of Lord Cardigan’s Hussars and play a part in the disastrous Retreat from Kabul, it culminates in the rascal’s finest – and most dishonest – turn.

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world. In addition to the other famous adventures come three episodes in the career of this eminent if disreputable adventurer. Plumbing the depths of dishonour, Flashman's up to his old tricks again. Whether embroiled in a plot to assassinate Emperor Franz-Josef, saving the Prince of Wales from scandal, or being chased by a horde of Zulus, Harry Flashman never disappoints.

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world. As the Light Brigade prepare to charge the Russian guns at Balaclava, Flashman assumes his characteristic battle position: sabre rattling, teeth chattering, bowels rumbling in terror and about to bolt.

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world. The British Empire needs a man to satisfy insatiable lust and indulge in ungentlemanly acts – fortunately it has Harry Flashman. And with the mighty Sikh army poised to invade India, Flashman must go back into secret service and this time contend with the intrigues of the Court of Punjab.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories surely constitute the finest series of historical short stories in literature, mingling the comedy and the tragedy, the pathos and the irony, or, in Napoleon’s phrase, the sublime and the ridiculous. It is Napoleon and his Europe, his dedicated followers and the awakened nationalisms of the peoples they enraged, possessing our minds in savage realism and enrapturing romance. And in Brigadier Etienne Gerard, Arthur Conan Doyle created a hero worthy to take his place in the great line stretching from Homer’s Odysseus to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, nearest of all perhaps to Stevenson’s Allan Breck and Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.

Elizabethan England, and a dastardly Spanish plot to take over the throne is uncovered. It's up to Agent Archie Noble to save Queen and country in this saucy and swashbuckling romp from the bestselling author of The Flashman Papers and The Pyrates. Spoiled, arrogant, filthy rich, and breathtakingly beautiful, the young Lady Godiva Dacre is exiled from the court of Good Queen Bess (who can't abide red-haired competition) to her lonely estate in distant Cumberland, where she looks forward to bullying the peasantry and getting her own imperious way. Little does she guess that the turbulent Scottish border is the last place for an Elizabethan heiress, beset by ruthless reivers (many of them unshaven), blackmailing ruffians, fiendish Spanish plotters intent on regime change and turning Merrie England into a ghastly European Union province. And no one to rely on but her half-witted blonde school chum, a rugged English superman with a knack for disaster, and a dashing highwayman who looks like Errol Flynn but has a Glasgow accent. To say nothing of warlocks, impersonators, taxi-drivers riding brooms, burlesque artists, the drunkest man in Scotland, and several quite normal characters - oh, yes, gossips, it's all happening in The Reavers, a moral tale obviously conceived in some kind of fit by Flashman author George MacDonald Fraser … well, he's getting on, and was bound to crack eventually. He admits (nay, insists) that it's a crazy story for readers who love fun for its own sake.

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world. A career in politics beckons for Flashman, until it’s scuppered by a crooked game of cards. Forced to flee London, Flashy journeys to America where he encounters an assortment of characters, including a New Orleans madam and a young Mr Lincoln…

Coward, scoundrel, lover and cheat, but there is no better man to go into the jungle with. Join Flashman in his adventures as he survives fearful ordeals and outlandish perils across the four corners of the world. A mission calls for a master of disguise, deceit and treachery: there's only one man for the job. When a legendary femme fatale delivers him into the clutches of the dastardly Otto von Bismarck, Flashman will need all the cunning and seductive charm he can muster to escape this plot.

'As a writer of the English language there has been no one to touch Stevenson in a hundred years...as a story-teller he is unsurpassed' George MacDonald Fraser When young David Balfour is orphaned he discovers some surprising truths about his family. His meeting with his uncle Ebenezer turns out to have disastrous consequences leading to kidnap and imprisonment on board a ship bound for the Carolinas. However, the voyage is full of incident and after violent conflict and a shipwreck, David finds himself in a daredevil chase across the Scottish Highlands in the company of the irrepressible warrior Alan Breck Stewart...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Thomas Hughes' novel about the mischievous but kind-hearted schoolboy Tom Brown inspired other school novels, including Frank Richards' Billy Bunter stories and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The novel begins at Tom's childhood home in the Vale of the White Horse, where he spends his days out in the fields with his pony. This early idyllic setting it set up as a contrast to the stresses that Tom undergoes later at Rugby boarding school when he encounters the bully Flashman. Tom is helped through his struggles by his friends Harry 'Scud' East and the frail but brilliant George Arthur, whom Tom protects, and who ultimately helps Tom develop into a young gentleman ready for Oxford university.

The Pyrates is all the swashbucklers that ever were, rolled into one great Technicoloured pantomime – tall ships and desert islands, impossibly gallant adventurers and glamorous heroines, buried treasure and Black Spots, devilish Dons and ghastly dungeons, plots, duels, escapes, savage rituals, tender romance and steaming passion, all to the accompaniment of ringing steel, thunderous broadsides, sweeping film music, and the sound of cursing extras falling in the water and exchanging period dialogue. Even Hollywood buccaneers were never like this.

Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales by many writers, about men and women who have borne arms, reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings's lifetime of studying war. It rings the changes through the centuries, between the heroic, tragic and comic; the famous and the humble. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome's captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon's marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton and the modern SAS. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female 'abosi' fighters of Dahomey and heroic ambulance drivers of World War I, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: though nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy. This is a book to inspire in turn fascination, excitement, horror, amazement, occasionally laughter. Max Hastings mingles respect for the courage of those who fight with compassion for those who become their victims, above all civilians, and especially in the twenty-first century, which some are already calling 'the Post-Heroic Age'.

George MacDonald Fraser’s hilarious stories of the most disastrous soldier in the British Army – collected together for the first time in one volume. Private McAuslan, J., the Dirtiest Soldier in the Word (alias the Tartan Caliban, or the Highland Division’s answer to the Pekin Man) first demonstrated his unfitness for service in The General Danced at Dawn. He continued his disorderly advance, losing, soiling or destroying his equipment, through the pages of McAuslan in the Rough. The final volume, The Sheikh and the Dustbin, pursues the career of the great incompetent as he shambles across North African and Scotland, swinging his right arm in time with his right leg and tripping over his untied laces. His admirers know him as court-martial defendant, ghost-catcher, star-crossed lover and golf caddie extraordinary. Whether map-reading his erratic way through the Sahara by night or confronting Arab rioters, McAuslan’s talent for catastrophe is guaranteed. Now, for the first time, the inimitable McAuslan stories are collected together in one glorious volume.

Can Daddy Pig train Peppa, George and Suzy to be the next Joe Root, Alastair Cook and Stuart Broad? It is a very sunny day. Perfect for a game of cricket! Daddy Pig teaches Peppa, George and Suzy Sheep how to play cricket in the garden, followed by the most important part of the game - taking a break for tea and cake! Everyone loves cricket, especially Daddy Pig! The perfect book for your little cricketers, teaching them the rules of the game as well as teamwork and sportsmanship.