Flashman author George MacDonald Fraser dies aged 82 after cancer battle

Fraser - whose fans included P G Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis - died after a battle with cancer.

He wrote the first novel of the Flashman Papers in 1969 after he quit as assistant editor of the Glasgow Herald.

The book imagines what happened after Flashman - the bully in Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays - was expelled from Rugby for drunkenness.

Eleven more novels were to follow in the series, during which Flashman - the most lily-livered hero in Victorian England - fornicates and brawls his way round the empire, provides Abraham Lincoln with his "you can't fool all the people all the time" quotation, and accidentally starts the charge of the Light Brigade.

Each novel purports to come from packets of autobiographical notes discovered in the Sixties.

Fraser - who proudly pointed out that a third of the first book's American reviewers believed the Flashman papers to be real - said his antihero's appeal was hardly surprising.

"People like rascals, they like rogues," he told the BBC in 2006. "I was always on the side of the villain when I was a child and went to the movies. I wanted Basil Rathbone to kill Errol Flynn."

Fraser, who lived on the Isle of Man, was awarded an OBE in 1999 for a wide literary career that included screenplays for the Bond movie Octopussy and a 1973 version of The Three Musketeers.

He was born in Carlisle in 1925 and served with the Army in Burma and India during the Second World War.