Flashman and the Man from The Times

Carol

This extract from the online Times precedes the story. "In Sir Harry Flashman, the moustachioed Victorian cad, bounder and lecher, the late George MacDonald Fraser took another man's fictional creation (the Rugby School bully in Tom Brown's Schooldays), added lashings of humour and layers of braggadocio, and made him his own. Despite the worst of intentions, Flashman is invariably in the right place at the right time, and is Mentioned in Dispatches by accident. To mark the author's death we present an extract from that most inglorious episode in his hero's life, The Road to Charing Cross, in which he encounters the real-life Times correspondent and legendary 'human ferret' Henri Blowitz"

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article3127980.ece
You can also read the original report in the Times on the Charge of the Light Brigade.