Marsden, Sam. "Emma Thompson: I have made my peace over Kenneth Branagh's affair". The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited . Retrieved 15 June 2015. Some sources give her year of birth as 1911, possibly due to Manning's well-known obfuscations of her age. The Braybrooke and Braybrooke biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography both give the 1908 date. Braybrooke & Braybrooke 2004, p.1 In 1942 Smith was appointed as Controller of English and Arabic Programming at the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem; the job was to begin later but in early July, with the German troops rapidly advancing on Egypt, he persuaded Manning to go ahead to Jerusalem to "prepare the way". [90] [91] Palestine [ edit ] Her gallery of personages is huge, her scene painting superb, her pathos controlled, her humour quiet and civilized.

Nobody saunters or jaunts in encircled Bucharest. Harriet and Guy take a horse-drawn carriage – the beast is a pathetic nag, the driver sinister. They venture a sleigh ride; the too-thin ice groans. In a mountain resort, they wander paths through dark pines to a nunnery, where they walk in on a dark tableau of abasement. At the cinema, they watch newsreels of northern Europe’s roads streaming with strafed refugees. In the park, they stroll among beggars and overhear reports of an assassination. So glittering is the overall parade - and so entertaining the surface - that the trilogy remains excitingly vivid; it amuses, it diverts and it informs, and to do these things so elegantly is no small achievement' Sunday TimesShe was annoyed at the same time, seeing his willingness to have Sasha here as a symptom of spiritual flight--the flight from the undramatic responsibility of to one person which marriage was." Many of the poets out here are refugees: all are exiles,” she wrote in Egypt, one of her temporary homes. “That sense of a missed experience, that no alternative experience can dispel, haunts most of us.” Meanwhile, those recently uprooted by the Ukrainian war (I count myself among them) who have escaped the worst that war can throw at them—the destruction of home, health, the loss of limbs, family or friends—may take cold comfort from a moment of unaccustomed optimism from Manning in book four. To a friend bemoaning the loss of a glittering career the war has perhaps permanently truncated, Harriet replies philosophically: “We’re all displaced persons these days. Guy and I have accumulated more memories of loss and flight in two years than we could in a whole lifetime of peace. And, as you say, it’s not over yet. But we’re seeing the world. We might as well try and enjoy it.” I’m sure some of the story here was meant to be satirical, but I’m not sure even Manning knew how much. Because I was left with this: Why were they there? What need for an English teacher, his wife and cohorts, soap-opera-ish friends and enemies . . . in Rumania, first, and then, when that country was overrun, in Greece, and then boarding the last boat to Egypt? Olivia Manning, Βαλκανική Τριλογία, το οποίο είναι αυτοβιογραφικό μιας και η συγγραφέας έζησε από κοντά όσα αφηγείται, ως σύζυγος μέλους του Βρετανικού Συμβουλίου στο Βουκουρέστι και μετά στην Ελλάδα. Η Manning περιγράφει την ζωή της σε σχέση με την ταχεία μεταστροφή της Συμμαχικής Ρουμανίας σε μέλος του Άξονα και πως αυτό επέδρασε και στη δική της ζωή. The Smiths initially rented a flat, but later moved in with the diplomat Adam Watson, who was working with the British Legation. [43] Those who knew Manning at the time described her as a shy, provincial girl who had little experience with other cultures. She was both dazzled and appalled by Romania. The café society, with its wit and gossip, appealed to her, but she was repelled by the peasantry and the aggressive, often mutilated, beggars. [44] [45] Her Romanian experiences were captured in the first two volumes of The Balkan Trilogy ( The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City), considered one of the most important literary treatments of Romania during the war. In her novels, Manning described Bucharest as being on the margins of European civilisation, "a strange, half-Oriental capital" that was "primitive, bug-ridden and brutal", whose citizens were peasants, whatever their wealth or status. [45] [46] Soldiers marching in Bucharest, 1941

That extract comes from Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy(published in three parts between 1960–65), a book which seems more relevant in 2022 than at any time since it was written. Followed about a decade later by The Levant Trilogy, the six books in total—collectively known as Fortunes of War—tell the story of mismatched newlyweds Harriet Pringle and her husband Guy, a British Council lecturer, as they try to find stability and preserve their relationship across Romania, Greece, and Egypt during the Second World War. Their efforts are often in vain; as Hitler’s armies spread across Europe and the Levant, the Pringles are repeatedly uprooted and forced to flee by air or sea, finding accommodation and employment wherever they can. In the process, they become the only constant in each other’s lives, in a marriage increasingly beleaguered by circumstance and incompatibility. Short of food and money, Manning spent long hours writing after work. [3] [19] Miles took Manning under his wing, dazzling her with dinners, literary conversation, and gossip, and providing unaccustomed support. A married man with two children, he told Manning that his wife was an invalid and no longer able to tolerate sex; they soon became lovers. Manning later recalled that "sex for both of them was the motivating charm of life". [20] Simon Boulderstone, a young officer who encounters Harriet on first arriving in Egypt, and who is wounded at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Prince Yakimov, an Englishman of noble Russian and Irish descent who, though likable, sponges off the rest of the expatriate community. [2] Manning has said that the scrounging Prince Yakimov is based in the Fitzrovian novelist Julian MacLaren-Ross. (Both are distinguished by an unusual overcoat in which they are always dressed).In July 1939, Walter Allen introduced Manning to the charming Marxist R. D. "Reggie" Smith. [30] [31] [32] Smith was a large, energetic man, possessed of a constant desire for the company of others. [33] The son of a Manchester toolmaker, he had studied at Birmingham University, where he had been coached by the left-wing poet Louis MacNeice and founded the Birmingham Socialist Society. [34] According to the British intelligence organisation MI5, Smith had been recruited as a communist spy by Anthony Blunt on a visit to Cambridge University in 1938. [35]