George MacDonald Frazer is a genius. From his pen leaps the fully grown bounder, cad and all round rascal that is the inimitable Harry Flashman (VC KCB KCIE). If one reads Tom Brown’s Schooldays one finds the youthful Flashy roasting young boys and all the rest of it. Frazer takes this vile specimen of humanity and, in the form of his own memoirs, places him in every great battle of the Nineteenth Century, from the Charge of the Light Brigade, to the Indian Mutiny, to Little Bighorn and Custer’s Last Stand. And all the while Flashman – like all true bullies a tremendous coward – is quaking in his spurred cavalryman’s boots.

Frazer is as much an historian as anything, and the “memoirs” are so ac- curate that many (especially, it has to be said, our friends on the other side of the pond) are led to believe that this character really did bounder his way across the bed sheets of history and live to write his own brilliant account of his womanizing exploits. Thus Florence Nightingale, Prince Albert, George Custer and Lord Cardigan are all completely convincing, and, one feels, true to their actual selves.

But perhaps Frazer’s greatest achievement is to construct a character whom one loves but is in every way awful. In one memorable episode, Flash is racing across the frozen wastes of the Russian winter in a sled, escaping the captivity of a fearsome noble, having picked up his beautiful daughter along the way, pursued by a band of equally fear- some men on horseback. As the men gain, Flashman has a brilliant idea. Undoing the canvas, he casts the naked and sleeping girl (whose room he has been visiting nightly for the last month or so) from her nest of furs, straight out upon the snow, the sled speeding off into the distance, freed of unnecessary weight!

And yet we still love him. He promises to elope with a French prostitute in New Orleans, only to sell her to a native American tribe. And we still love him. Why? Because, I think, he is never the overlord. He is always the underdog, trying to desperately to escape trouble and live an easy life, and always, somehow, failing. The archetypal coward, he invariably, by some incredible stroke of luck, comes out as the hero. He heads the charge into the guns at Balaclava due to a bolting horse, and is awarded the VC after the Indian Mutiny for trying to do little more than chasing after an exotic queen. Very few books are as much fun as the Flashman series. I only wish I hadn’t read them all already.

When David Hockney exhibited iPad drawings at his exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2012, the art world was be- mused. Many were unsure as to what to make of them. Some treated the works as cutting edge artistic practice. What they failed to appreciate, though, was that such art has a surprisingly long history, which has been recently enriched by the discovery of lost computer art by Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol doesn’t need much introduction. Feted and hated in equal measure, his art is as recognisable as Michelangelo’s and is the quintessential artistic product of the consumerist phase of the Twentieth Century. His “Factory”, a base for the mass production of work and amphetamine-fuelled parties, is now legendary. Seemingly there is little more that could prompt further recognition of his artistic genius.

Then this year it was announced that previously unknown artworks by Warhol had been discovered on a 1985 floppy disc. The reaction was one of uncontained excitement. That the man who was at the cutting edge of technological advancements in art had turned his hand towards the digital sphere was an intriguing prospect.

The Amiga® floppy disks were found in the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum and extracted by members of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club in conjunction with numerous experts. The artworks are the result of Warhol’s commission by Commodore International to explore the graphic arts capabilities of an Amiga personal computer. Cory Arcangel, a “Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd”, discovered the existence of this commission from an advert on YouTube. Suspecting that the artist may have produced such artworks he approached the Andy Warhol Museum for permission to comb its archives for evidence to support his theory. His hunch proved correct. This was in 2011.

A painstaking process followed in which Arcangel, with the assistance of various computer experts, slowly succeeded in discovering the images. It was established early on that at- tempting to read the data on the disks could destroy the content. New and delicate methods had to be devised. In 2013 the CMU Computer Club, in collaboration with various other individuals and organisations, had formulated a plan for extracting the data. It worked, and to their delight 28 previously unknown digital images, 11 of which featured Warhol’s signature, were discovered.

The contents are fascinating. Some of Warhol’s most famous and iconic works are rein- vented in the digital medium. While visually enthralling they are also engaging on a personal level. By the 1980s Warhol was widely regarded as a spent artistic force. His artwork was produced to sell and he was accordingly criticised as a “business artist”. Indeed his justification for an exhibition of ten portraits displayed at the Jewish Museum in New York was “they’re going to sell”. He was thought to be breaking no new ground and was regarded as a curious survivor of the pop art age; a genius whose art had failed to evolve.

These newly discovered images conclusively prove this now-defunct argument to be thoroughly incorrect. They are the work of an artist constantly exploring his own legacy, rein- venting his past and seeking new mediums in which to do so. If one was told to choose the two images which are most readily associated with Warhol, the answer would, most probably, be Marilyn Monroe and a tin of Campbell’s soup.

That he would be willing to reinvent these images with which he is inextricably linked is testament to an artist ever committed to breaking new ground. It shows in the art. While Mon- roe, soup cans and his famous banana – which became synonymous with The Velvet Underground – all feature, there are also doodles, screenshots of a desktop and self portraits.

News of the discovery of new works are often received in a misleading way. A newly discovered Rembrandt sketch, say, might be lauded as his greatest ever artwork simply by virtue of its being new. The reaction to these computer images however has been wholly sincere and illuminating. Matt Wrbicon, the chief archivist at the Warhol Museum, has commented on the fascination of seeing the results of a “mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing a specific hand-to-eye coordination now suddenly grappling with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several inches from the screen”.

No doubt he resisted the urge to physically touch the screen.

It had to be enormously frustrating, but it also marked a huge transformation in our culture: the dawn of the era of affordable home computing. We can only wonder how he would explore and exploit the technologies that are so ubiquitous today. It is an intriguing thought.

Do you know the answer to this question? As follows. ‘Which war saw the first major use of hot air balloons?’

Well, if only someone had given the answer to me, aged ten. A true aficionado, ten-year-old me entered the Horrible Histories tenth anniversary competition. After popping to the post, however, I realised I’d got a qualifying question – that question – wrong. In sorry tatters lay my wispy wish to meet the makers of my favourite history books. I like to think I eventually got over this unhappy episode.

No irony was lost on me, then, while I sat, aged twenty-one, in an Oxford Literary Festival workshop, watching illustrator Martin Brown entertain a cosy audience. The average age of my co-spectators was approximately eight-and-three-quarters. A little awkward, perhaps. But eleven years late is better than never, I suppose.

“That’s a potato,” exclaims Brown, leaning back from a dubious attempt to draw a freehand circle. Cue wild giggles from the small crowd, enraptured by his scribble. He tries drawing a horse. “There’s a technical term for drawing things like horses,” he remarks, pausing: “Hard.”

When calling to mind the Horrible Histories series – described by publishers Scholastic as their “crown jewels” – readers will often check Terry Deary, who wrote them. Yet how much text could you quote? Or do you immediately see the loud, vibrant illustrations of Martin Brown, which, as a friend of mine once swore, “terrified the living Christ out of me”? His boisterous characters, robed in rudely faithful detail, are the skin of the memory, the faces of the horrible history cherished by many an impish childhood.

I put this to him afterwards, in a quiet, appropriately antique back room. You’re basically Horrible Histories, I said. Anyone else drawing the books wouldn’t be quite the same. “That’s very kind of you to say,” replied Brown, “but I wasn’t the only illustrator!”

This modesty is characteristic of him. Brown is usually tucked up in Dorset with his wife and daughters, out of public view – in stark contrast to partner-in-crime Deary, who periodically frequents the broadsheet interview circuit. Even just a few months ago, I was convinced he was living in Australia.

Not so. He’s been hoofing around this sceptred isle since 1989, a suitably historic year by all accounts. Brown’s first step on the ladder was a Scholastic series titled Coping With – teachers, parents, and so on – for which Brown and the author, Peter Corey, put together histories on each subject. “We liked it so much, we asked: could we do a Coping With History? The editors tapped their noses and said, ‘Hold that thought. Something’s come through I think you’d be interested in.’” Terry Deary had sent in a manuscript.

Thus, a partnership was ordained – “a perfect symbiotic relationship”, declares Brown. But with Deary in Durham, they generally don’t get much facetime. No dinners at Terry’s? “There would be if we were a tad closer. I’d like to see him more often, socially.” He laughs. “But we get along brilliantly.”

Brown spent his Melbourne childhood “constantly doodling”. Unsurprisingly, he excelled at art. He laments complacency though, and “very nearly failed” in sixth form; having intended to enter graphic design, he started training as an art teacher instead. But he didn’t even finish that, scuttling after three years to be a dogsbody in an ABC television studio. At no point, however, did he ever drop his pencil: always experimenting, always drawing.

Brown’s craft found a home, but only after upping sticks and ending up in London. He worked at Harrod’s (“I’d draw the customers and stick them up where they couldn’t see them”) before landing a job at London Graphics, which delivered art supplies to practically everyone who was anyone in the publishing world. By sheer sudden luck, he was at the heart of the business, with pretty much every phone number of every potential employer in the country on his desk.

His itinerant streak resurged. “I thought one day, ‘now or never’: I quit, called myself a cartoonist, stocked myself up with as many numbers and names I could remember, and started phoning people.” Then he took to the doorsteps, and the rest is, of course, horrible history.

Brown’s visual style is distinctive: all huge goggling eyes and big squidgy noses dressed up with exquisite historical precision; precision that he used to get from children’s non-fiction sections of libraries and, these days, from Google Images. He still nurses a soft spot for titles like The Vicious Vikings and The Savage Stone Age (“for once I could relax a bit about the costumes”). The jokes are impressively, effortlessly witty. Considering the young audience, the humour has remarkably sophisticated, age-wide appeal. Was that deliberate? Where did that come from?

From wide set of influences, it turns out. Illustrators, like Andrew Loomis, and strip cartoonists, like Johnny Hart, creator of B.C. (“where I get my eyes from”). Brown’s most intriguing inspirations are the great American editorial cartoonists, names like Ron Cobb and Pulitzer recipient Jeff MacNelly, father of the Shoe comic strip. “If I could get those wry payoffs, growing up,” he maintains, “I don’t see why kids today couldn’t.”

In fact, so thoroughly is Brown immersed in the cartooning tradition that he wears the badge ‘illustrator’ with humble disquiet. “People call me an illustrator. I’m not,” he grins. “The world is full of amazing illustrators. I’m happy to do it, but I’m not so big on colour, or picture design. It scares me a bit – give me a four-strip ba-boom gag and I’m happy as larry.”

Perhaps the editorial cartoonist’s mantle appeals, given his heroes? Like fellow children’s illustrator Chris Riddell, who has gone from carving dragons and monsters on the page to carving up George Osborne in the Observer. “Jealous? Oh, absolutely,” says Brown emphatically. He’d jump at the opportunity. “Editorial cartooning is the pinnacle of the art. Chris Riddell aside, I actually don’t think it’s always done particularly well in this country. I grew up looking at Australian and American editorial cartoonists, books and books of just stunning stuff. To be able to both produce such beautiful pieces of artwork, and include just that clever little twist or dig… it’s genius.”

And serious, too. “There are cartoonists outside the West doing what I’d be too timid to do, and being threatened and banned and all sorts, just for shining a light,” he adds admiringly. Portraying the past is, however, weighty work as well, as he is keen to stress. History, after all, is just another battlefield: his own way of paying his dues to truth.

The ten-year-old in me reluctantly anticipates the end of the hour, but insists on one last act. Awkwardly, I push forward a natty blue exercise book. It’s an imitation ‘Horrible Histories’ I drew in primary school, one of many inspired by his illustrations. He picks it up and flicks through it, smiling interestedly at my pencil frieze period figures, all wearing his signature eyes and noses.

“Well, I love these,” he murmurs brightly, “They’re charming.” He might be lying, but that hardly mattered. I had fully reverted from interviewer to child. “Will you sign it?” I ask, rather sheepishly. Of course he would. “But it’s usually the author who signs his own book,” quips Brown.

In my mind, I was back in the workshop audience. My ten-year-old self is gripped. I know the answers now. The war that saw the first major use of hot air balloons? The American Civil War, of course. Stepping away from the whiteboard, Martin Brown turns to offer a tip. “Keep drawing,” he urges, “If you don’t, your horse will always look like a sausage.”