With this episode, he is whirled up in the hellish carnage of the Taiping Revolt. In this, the bloodiest civil war in human history, China convulsed itself in an attempt to throw off the "foreign devils." Great Britain's prized opium trade -- the greatest narcotics scandal of all time -- was at stake. Human life was not so much cheap as barely reckoned at all. Flashman goes through the whole blood-bolted affair with his bowels like water, but he never loses his faculty for description...

There is a chapter in this book which I would select from a strong field as being exemplary. It recounts Lord Elgin's decision in 1860 to raze the SummerPalace at Peking, and it depicts the manner in which the order was carried out. The SummerPalace was not just a building. It was a gorgeous landscaped park of over 200 temples and great houses. Contemporary accounts of it and its contents show it to have been the summit of Manchu taste and civilization, perhaps unequalled in history. The pages which describe the actual desecration -- while Elgin read Darwin and Trollope in his tent -- are vivid, moving and awful. They promote Fraser well out of the thriller class and into the ranks of historical novelists.