"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 hope. But here, Olivia Manning sees it at a closer perspective than that of history, as a crisis lost in dust and anarchy…. The effect of war on the protagonists of Olivia Manning's fiction is the paradigm of a dismal contradiction: that human labor and human affection exist in a universe which makes rather little of either. She has a fine, tragic vision of the enormity of our littleness, and she defines that vision with force and with restraint. Her ironies are deep but understated; her prose is totally admirable in its chill clarity….

Each of the short works which make up the design [of this series] can be read either as part of the whole or as entities to themselves; and each details the progressive disintegration of the civilised world, whose dissolution is caused in part by the encroaching barbarism of the war, but largely by the weight of its own inertia and misrule.

Central to all the novels is Harriet Pringle. She has been swept by war…. In counterpoint to her civilian life of passive endurance, is the military life of Simon Boulderstone, the novel's second protagonist…. Simon, unlike Harriet, is fighting a palpable war, and the two meet only coincidentally. But their psychic direction is identical: a long process of deprivations which makes emotion and unaffordable luxury.

The fates that govern here are illogical and perverse. Trying to find safe harbor from the war is as likely to get one blown up as rushing into the forefront of the battle, and the book's strongest and deepest conviction is that of irrationality and misdirection….

The characters who ride the currents of this confusion are refugees from an age gone by…. They are the flotsam of British Empire, and though their lines often seem familiar, the stage they play on is stark. They are like people from early Graham Greene trying to negotiate life in a Beckett play. The image of their futility is powerful.

And there is a Spartan sophistication about Manning's work which is enormously moving. Early in this novel, a scene in a Cairo brothel dramatizes the relationship of rich and poor, England and Egypt, and, without the slightest resort to exclamation or explication, suggests the essential horror of calloused feeling and of living in the midst of inanity. Manning's people are not threatened by vice, but by an absence of virtue, a sense of vacuum and banality which pervades equally their battles and their flight from battles, which touches not only the embroiled bureaucracy of England and the dead grandeur of Egypt, but also the hopeless drifting of children, dying by inches on the open sea.

[Olivia Manning deserves] to rank among the very rare writers of our day whose gift of style and story is enlarged to importance by the dimensions of intelligence and moral purpose.