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 Manni...
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Critical Essay by Pamela Hansford Johnson
["The Danger Tree"] blessedly brings back Guy Pringle, one of the last of the attractive heroes in modern literature. Guy is sweet-natured, alt...
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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 sh...
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Critical Essay by Rachel Trickett
[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 dis...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Victoria Glendinning
The Sum of Things is the final volume of [Olivia Manning's] Levant Trilogy (itself a continuation of the Balkan Trilogy)….
[There] is clearly a...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Helen Mcneil
[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, po...
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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 m...
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Critical Essay by Hollis Alpert
There is no pretension in [Olivia Manning's] writing, and no bitterness—and yet her view of life is not in the least warped with sentimentality, although...
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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, somet...
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Critical Essay by Walter Allen
Ever since [Olivia Manning's] first novel, The Wind Changes, appeared in 1937, she has possessed an exceedingly pure and exact style, together with what one thin...
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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 provid...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Burgess
[Olivia Manning's trilogy, The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes] seems to me perhaps the most important long work of fiction to have bee...
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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 connectio...
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Critical Essay by Jeremy Treglown
The Danger Tree is the leisurely first part of [Olivia Manning's] trilogy …, and the reluctance of the narrative to take off is to a large extent compe...
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