Olivia Manning (born March 2, 1908 in Portsmouth – died July 23, 1980 on the Isle of Wight) was a noted British novelist. She studied at the Portsmouth School of Art then escaped Portsmouth to work at Peter Jones (department store), the Medici...
The lady's not for exhuming OLIVIA MANNING by Neville and June Braybrooke Chatto, £20, pp. 301, ISBN 0701177497 * £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 It's curious to reflect that in reviewing Olivia Manning's biography alone and prominently one is paying her...
Olivia Plender is a London-based artist and coeditor of Untitled magazine. Her work was recently featured in "Le Voyage Intérieur: Paris-London" at Espace EDF Electra in Paris and currently appears in the Tate Triennial at Tate Britain in London. She has been short-listed for...
[Olivia Manning's The Battle Lost and Won] displays all her impressive talent. The writing is spare, witty and dry; the characterization so precise and so discreet you are hardly aware of the skill. This is naturalism deployed with a high degree of art. Miss Manning catches the essential feeling of place and action, and has succeeded brilliantly in the unusual feat for a woman of describing war. The battle scenes, for various reasons, are among the best in the book. Miss Manning's readers are ...
"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 hope. But here, Olivia Manning sees it at a closer perspective than that of history, as a crisis lost in dust and anarchy…. The effect of war on the protagonists of Olivia Manning's fiction is the paradigm of a dismal contradiction: that human labor and human affection exist in a universe which makes rather little of either. She...
[Since] The Sum of Things must stand as the last novel in Olivia Manning's long and well-used career, it is still about contingent manouevres, but it is also, powerfully, about duration. In Manning's humane irony all events in life are radiantly fresh, but they are over quickly, their fulness is never quite used, and they never yield the knowledge which they tantalisingly might give if one knew where to look. So life continues until it is sliced off by death. Olivia Manning has managed to writ...
