George MacDonald Fraser was born in 1926 in Carlisle (Northern England). At the age of 18 he enlisted in the army. Served in India. During the Second World War he took part in the fighting in Burma. After returning from the front, he began working as a correspondent in his native Carlisle. Some time later he moved to live in Canada. In 1969 he began his career as a writer, releasing the first novel in the Harry Flashman series, which gained enormous popularity. A total of 12 books were published in this series. Fraser is also known as the author of scripts for films: “The Three Musketeers”, “Octopussy” (from the James Bond series). Fraser also wrote a considerable number of documentary books: memoirs about the Second World War, historical studies about the history of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands in the Middle Ages and Modern times. The writer died in January 2008 from cancer. Website about Harry Paget Flashman (Russian) - From the biography of the “hero” Harry Paget Flashman, a brigadier general in the army of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, was born in the city of Ashby, England in 1822. After expelled from school in Rugby in 1839, he entered the 11th Dragoons, thereby beginning his dizzying career. By the will of the author, he was thrown into the hottest corners of the Victorian empire: he participated in the Crimean War, in the Afghan wars, in the suppression of the sepoy uprising in India, visited Borneo and Madagascar, the American prairies and the gold mines of California. By his nature, he absorbed all the most essential signs of an antihero. He was treacherous, deceitful, mean, unprincipled, cowardly, and on top of that, he was proud of all this. Thanks to all this, as well as remarkable luck, he always managed to get away with it, receiving new awards and ranks for each successive campaign. His sober and truthful descriptions of all the events that he observed during his turbulent life make his memoirs an invaluable masterpiece of his era. Flashman lived to a ripe old age and died, surrounded by honor, in 1915.