Flashman author Fraser dies aged 82

The 82-year-old former soldier, who died after a battle with cancer, worked as a journalist for the Herald newspaper, then known as the Glasgow Herald, for many years.

He also wrote screenplays and a memoir of his experiences as an infantryman in the Burma campaign, but it is for his semi-historical novels based around Sir Harry Flashman that Fraser will be best remembered.

In Flashman and its 11 follow-up titles, Fraser re-imagined the bully of Thomas Hughes' Victorian classic Tom Brown's Schooldays grown up and serving as an officer in the Army.

Each of the novels purports to come from packets of faux-autobiographical notes - the Flashman Papers - discovered in the 1960s.

Fraser's Flashman fights, drinks and womanises his way around the British empire, playing a leading role in the pivotal historical events of the century on the way.

Despite being a vain, cowardly rogue, Flashman emerges from each adventure covered in glory.

Though many found Flashman's 19th-century racism and sexism distasteful, the books sold in huge numbers, and Fraser was widely praised for his attention to historical detail. The author Kingsley Amis called him "a marvellous reporter and a first-rate historical novelist".

Fraser, who lived on the Isle of Man, was awarded an OBE in 1999 for a literary career that included a number of screenplays including the Bond movie Octopussy.

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