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“... novels nowadays are just travel books,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett grumbled to Barbara Pym in 1960. ‘Olivia has just published one about Bulgaria.’ She hadn’t noticed that the setting of The Great Fortune is in fact Romania. But she had a point. Journeys, voluntary and enforced, are big in Olivia Manning’s work, as ...”

“... The title of Olivia Manning’s last book, from Housman’s heroic-ironic epitaph on an earlier war, announces a summing-up: the last volume of a trilogy, the trilogy itself the continuation of a previous one; the final flowing out to sea of a roman-fleuve of six volumes, completed just before the author’s death ...”

“... but in the end Waugh’s work belongs within the realistic tradition of the English novel. So does Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, which is the only other lengthy attempt by an English novelist to handle part of World War Two as a theme. (Anthony Powell’s three relevant volumes in The Music of Time are too closely woven into the rest of the series to ...”

“... found in the body of the book. Why Ian Fleming and not, say, Gavin Ewart? Why Alfred Noyes and not Olivia Manning? Why not both A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Doubtless for all sorts of reasons. Why Tannhäuser and not Parsifal? Why summarise The Shaving of Shagpat and not Living or Loving? However, a measure of arbitrariness is welcome: it mimes the ...”

“... Byzantine churches, the stuffy but intriguing British Council types – all irresistibly recall Olivia Manning. A coup and a kidnapping put some strain on Janice Elliott’s talents, which lie more obviously in the social comedy of international bureaucrats and culture vultures, or in the private intensities of unplanned, even undesired ...”

“... Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as Dostoevsky and the ...”

“... from Istanbul: neither takes much interest in the historic vestiges of Smyrna, in the way an Olivia Manning character would have done in this situation, but instead each devotes herself to indulgence and capering around. There are hints at times of a world like that of The sun also rises, when you wake up not surprised to be still half-drunk and ...”

“... in Poland, whence he escaped to join the British Council circus in Bucharest made famous by Olivia Manning (he even said ‘What ho!’ three times in Reggie Turner’s ineffable Shakespeare production). Detaching himself to Egypt, he joined the Army and was commissioned on the General List. So began an often convivial wartime career as liaison ...”

“... Knox. She could drive her friends to fury with casuistical arguments and ‘being impossible’. Olivia Manning, a gifted writer but one who never felt that justice had been properly done to her own gifts, had a forked tongue where her sometime friend Stevie was concerned. She recognised, I think, the presence of a genius greater than her ...”

“... most of these squabbling, down-at-heel literati would be comfortably at home in the pages of Olivia Manning. To the extent that it offers a kind of instant history, Curfew must already be a period piece. The nightly curfew, with its silence broken by the wailing of sirens and the droning of police helicopters, was lifted before the end of the ...”

“... friends to be difficult and in London there seems to have been no lack of choice. The sketch of Olivia Manning is one of the best. He presents her irritating, often unpleasant vagaries with something like affection. It is part of King’s technique that when he has something nasty to say he quotes somebody else as saying it: a device that is several ...”

“... the lively responsiveness of her letters. ‘If she’s really dying, send her my love,’ Olivia Manning said when Stevie Smith was taken to hospital. The poet is reported to have enjoyed this. She had entertained the idea of suicide as an honourable way out since she was nine; she once tried to kill herself by slashing her wrists at Newnes and ...”

“... Bovril treatment, and the writers he respected or got on with were often women: Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Margaret Drabble, Alison Lurie. The letters from Farrell’s years of post-Booker fame are an education in the glamour of English literary celebrity. ‘I don’t want to be interfering about your azalea,’ he writes to Drabble, ‘but ...”

“... together. And some of the nuances are lost on us, or left hanging as possibilities. Was Frederic Manning, for instance, the Australian who would later write Her Privates We, in love with Dorothy, and wounded when she preferred Pound? We are not told. This is not to say that the letters can be left to speak for themselves. On the contrary, the two young ...”

“... by the response to his work by English critics and writers. There was a wonderful encounter with Olivia Manning when she berated him for his pessimism, his aridity and his lack of hope. But the two actors and Beckett were insiders as much as outsiders in the great city, they were deeply treasured and supported with immense zeal by powerful people in ...”