Olivia Manning Summary

Critical Essay by Horace Reynolds Although the blurb describes ["The Wind Changes"] as a novel "of a woman and two men in Dublin during the Black and Tan days," Miss Mannin... Read more

Critical Essay by Zahir Jamal [The Battle Lost and Won, the second volume in Ms Manning's 'Levant Trilogy',] seems likely to form one of the duller chapters in that meta-novel she... Read more

Critical Essay by Edith Milton "The Battle Lost and Won" takes place in Egypt at the turning point of World War II…. Historically, the Alamein was a moment of peculiar grace and h... Read more

Critical Essay by John Mellors Confusion, strangeness, things falling apart—that is the wartime atmosphere which Olivia Manning evoked so vividly [in the Levant Trilogy]. She showed it on two l... Read more

Critical Essay by Howard Mumford Jones The characters in [The Wind Changes] form a self-conscious and self-tortured triangle, the love-relation … which gives the story its substance. Much is ma... Read more

Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement The theme of The Great Fortune is the discovery of solid concord and tolerance which results from a shared predicament. Juxtaposing the personal, someti... Read more

Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement So full of intriguing minor characters is [Friends and Heroes], so evocative of both place and mood, and so well proportioned the incidents that provide... Read more

Critical Essay by Elaine Feinstein To my mind, the two volumes of Olivia Manning's Balkan trilogy which are set in Rumania … show best how she can shift our whole sense of our connection... Read more