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“... that she had never yet in all her life experienced with anyone,’ we are told of absconding Olivia in Heat and Dust. Actually, it was unnecessary for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to spell out, and in such novelettish terms, what we might have gathered for ourselves – an odd lapse in an otherwise evocative and compact work. Such romantic entanglements, we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Halloo your name to the reverberate hills And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out ‘Olivia’. Olivia … Viola, herself a physical echo of Sebastian, is disguised as Cesario, whose proxy wooing echoes her own real feelings. This is literary criticism of the highest order. Equally sharp is Bate’s comment on ...”

“... literature and poetry readings. Those who saw the television series Fortunes of War, based on Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, with its caricatures of British Council activities in wartime Cairo, will get the idea. The Berliners made suitably sardonic jokes, on the lines of ‘Don’t get the jitters, allies, we are in front of you.’ Much dried food ...”

“... 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 adultery. Still, the ...”

“... Ljubljana, 26 September. Here playing a small part in a BBC drama series, an adaptation of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, Yugoslavia standing in for Rumania, Ljubljana for Belgrade. The people here are Slovenians, tall, fine-looking and Roman in their grace and self-assurance. A few (Croats?) are small and fierce and heavily-moustached, and look as ...”

“... in Britain? Very well, let’s look at what we have. Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy, about combatants; Olivia Manning’s trilogies, mostly about civilians dodging death, deportation or destitution while contending armies reel back and forth. Alexander Baron’s From the City, from the Plough. The Cruel Sea. Sharp, sardonic sketches, in New Writing, Shaving ...”

“... What​ I most wanted was a SodaStream. A person with a SodaStream was in charge of his destiny to a pretty awesome degree. Same with the Breville sandwich toaster. Instead of a slice of Scottish Pride smeared in beef paste, you could go your own way, killing it softly, taking over the kitchen and incinerating a few squares of plastic cheese and a bit of ham in a sarcophagus before hitting the street like the god of modernity ...”

“... much like any other. The jacket is pink, not sackcloth, with an illustration from a watercolour by Olivia Spencer Bower of a verandah in the sun with a table covered in fruit and flowers. Among the leaves and leaf shadow can be seen a basket, a pot-plant, a watering can. If you were standing there, what would you hear coming from indoors? There might be Mozart ...”

“... 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 Russian ...”

“... masculine things like killing wounded rats): but men aren’t any use to women any more. Olivia of The Weather in the Streets is recognisably Dinah of The Echoing Grove, the woman on the outside, betraying and in her turn betrayed. Again it is the old mother, intelligent, even noble, who interferes. Again the illicit child is destroyed, the licit ...”

“... stressed the disastrous effects of tight corseting on young bodies. In 1882 the Boston dressmaker Olivia Flynt described the typical parental attitude:We express regret that they have placed corsets upon their daughters, and they reply: ‘Dear me, the child is larger than I was when I married, and really larger than I am now; I cannot have her grow so ...”

“... 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 spend ...”

“... 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 officer ...”

“... school – as in Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia or Violette Leduc’s Thérèse and Isabelle – is a sealed, adolescent world, ripe for melodrama. In Mrs S, it is just as you would expect: the grass is green, the skirts are pleated and the choir sing in Latin, ‘mouths synchronised’. On the way to ...”