No-one would mistake the Flashman books for great literature. They’re full of cheaply-imagined sex and more than a bit of jingoism. But it would be impossible to deny their serious attention to historical detail, their capture of something essential about the vanished life of the British Empire. George MacDonald Fraser, the man who brought us Flashman and his epxloits (as well as the screenplay for Octopussy) died today at the age of 82.

Flashman began life as a minor character in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a classic of the boy’s-school genre–a bully who gets expelled for getting drunk. But Fraser reinvented him as a fairly amoral soldier-adventurer in his twelve Flashman novels, the first of which appeared in 1969 and the last in 2005. The novels document Flashman’s doings all across the Empire. It’s a strange, unparalleled literary career: Fraser single-handedly resurrected and re-invented the figure whom George Orwell once called the “Englishman-of-infinite-resource-and-sagacity.” Orwell’s Englishman was usually dully moral; Flashman was most certainly not. For all his flaws as a character, it’s certain the we won’t see his like again, or Fraser’s.