For Balladeer’s Blog’s Number One Harry Flashman Novel click HERE . For background info on George MacDonald Fraser’s infamous anti-hero Harry Paget Flashman you can also click that link.
Reaction to my list of The Top Five Harry Flashman Novels continues to come in, with readers wanting more Flashman reviews. Here’s my take on the novel which would have been in sixth place if I had done a list of my Top Six Harry Flashman Novels.
6. FLASHMAN AND THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT (1990)
Time Period: The First Sikh War (1845-1846)
The Flashman Papers jump around to different periods of Harry Flashman’s life and this novel details our main character’s adventures following the events in Flashman’s Lady, published in 1977. Flashman’s Lady came in 3rd place in my rankings.
NOTE: The Mountain of Light of the novel’s title refers to the Koh-I-Noor (“Mountain of Light”) Diamond, which at the time belonged to the rulers of the Punjab in India and which features prominently in the story.
Synopsis: Queen Victoria’s least trustworthy Cavalry Officer, Harry Paget Flashman, is once again in the thick of things. A series of false starts to an all-out war have set things dangerously on edge in the Punjab, with a potential bloodbath in the offing if one false move is made.
Harry being Harry, he STILL manages to find time for a brief fling with the wife of a fellow British Officer before getting thrust into the line of fire. And into the schemes and political machinations of the real-life Maharani Jeendan, her brother Jawaheer, the British East India Company and a fanatical real-life military sect called the Khalsa.
At the center of this tangled web, lurking like a thing alive, is the Koh-I-Noor Diamond, the Mountain of Light itself, passing from hand to hand – and in some cases navel to navel – while being coveted by nearly every figure in our story. Figures which include two real-life American mercenaries who partially inspired Kipling’s tale of The Man Who Would Be King.
The title and savage action of this Flashman novel certainly put one in mind of H. Rider Haggard’s writings but the story’s account of hedonism and political intrigues at the Punjab royal court in Lahore is more along the lines of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.
The deliciously decadent Maharani Jeendan is our protagonist’s main bedmate in his latest sword and sex adventure, followed closely by Mangla, the Maharani’s beautiful, calculating slave who had – as history confirms – engineered events to secretly become one of the wealthiest women of the Punjab despite her condition of servitude. Continue reading
To the Democrats and Labour the ONLY Muslims who are “authentic” and are even allowed to speak at college campuses are the ones who hate the Western World. The others are banned as “Western Triumphalists” who have “internalized Western oppression.” For one of my articles on those peace-loving Muslims who bravely fight for reform click 
April 24th: Mbalon, Nigeria – Islamists opened fire on a Catholic Mass, killing NINETEEN innocent people and injuring 6 more. COEXISTENCE! 
Free Speech has been under assault by both Liberals and Conservatives in recent decades. There was a time when Liberals actively supported freedom of expression because they understood it was THE primary freedom from which all other freedoms flowed. The early figures from my own country’s history protected speech with the FIRST Amendment to the Constitution because they knew all too well that ideas that are considered taboo and offensive today might be considered essential truths by future generations.
They became the Political Correctness Police and anyone who offended their 1960s attitudes had to be silenced because – as they knew so well from their own experience – when controversial ideas are given the room to breathe they can often thrive. The totalitarian asses of the 1960s can’t bear the fact that younger people might have opinions that offend THEM as much as their opinions offended their parents’ generation. 
Keep in mind Spinoza’s wonderful line “Every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.” That still rings true because no matter what the hypersensitive fools who want to censor the rest of us find offensive NONE of them has the right to try to extinguish one single creation or product of a human mind. 
In the past Balladeer’s Blog has dealt with the way the increasingly deranged Democrats do their best to lie about and whitewash Islam’s violent and intolerant past. I’m an atheist and I’ll point out again that Islam started out on the Arabian Pensinsula and then, through blood and violence like any other religion, spread throughout much of Europe, much of Africa (Muslims ran the brutal African Slave Trade long before Europeans got involved) and then spread Eastward all the way to the Philippines. 
Street Artist Sabo has earned genuine folk hero status with his guerilla art projects that he sets up in public, often under the cover of darkness, in various cities. Daylight unveils his masterpieces of dissent. Sabo takes on the subjects that too many faux iconoclasts are afraid to handle, most recently the corporate fascist Mark “Skippy” Zuckerberg. 
Since ANY Facebook user can block anybody or anything they want, such heavy-handed interference with the free exchange of ideas is as unnecessary as it is ugly. (Personally I left Facebook years ago since it’s like being trapped in the suburban barbecue from hell.) 
THE SLEUTH: Ellis Parker, Chief of Detectives in Burlington County, NJ. Parker’s professional reputation was such that detectives from other jurisdictions often sought help from him. 
In 2016 Balladeer’s Blog pointed out several times that the only hope for the opening steps in recognizing and addressing the rampant corruption in America’s Third World Level thugocracy would be if either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders miraculously won the Presidency. 
I’ve been inundated with (unsought) congratulations by people from both sides who used to think I was overly pessimistic about the cesspool that has masqueraded as a government in the U.S. for several decades. They’ve been graciously telling me that they’ve seen – in the frantic reaction to President Trump’s attempts to Drain the Swamp – verification of everything I’ve said over the years about the white collar criminals called career politicians. 
FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH (1907) – Written by Thomas William Lawson, a writer and stock manipulator who made a fortune from shady stock deals … in between advocating for cleaning up Wall Street to shut down those fleece jobs. The reforms Lawson campaigned for were taken up decades later when Franklin Roosevelt appointed future Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas to head the Securities Exchange Commission. 
Jim Randolph, one of the novel’s main characters, is in the T.R. mold: he may be a bloated rich pig but at least he’s a bloated rich pig with a sense of noblesse oblige. Jim shares Teddy Roosevelt’s disdain for the Trusts and for con men who use the stock market to rip off their clients. 
Murky Mueller and his criminal cohorts had a busy week. I’ve already weighed in on it but here’s a take from folk hero Lloyd Marcus. 
