[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 been written by an English woman novelist since [World War II]; it seems also … to be one of the finest records we have of the impact of that war on Europe…. In the first year of the war Harriet watches the slow corruption of a doomed civilization. The observation finds comic, as well as poetic, expression: the Rumanians are drawn with exasperated tenderness and are sometimes caricatured, but they remain real and rounded. (pp. 94-5)

The minute and accurate record of the Balkans under the stress of war is only one aspect of the trilogy; the other aspect, perhaps more important, is Harriet Pringle's attempt to understand her husband—a process which is incomplete even at the end of Friends and Heroes...