Ever since [Olivia Manning's] first novel, The Wind Changes, appeared in 1937, she has possessed an exceedingly pure and exact style, together with what one thinks of as a painter's eye for the visible world, that has enabled her to render particularly well the sensual surface of landscape and places…. It is a prose and an eye that seem accurately to take the measure of things. Yet this exactness of rendition, when applied to human beings, has sometimes seemed to have a diminishing effect, as of a lowering of vitality, a sense of Gissing-like hopelessness in the face of life. One felt this in A Different Face (1957), in which a man returns to Coldmouth, a town on the south coast of England, only to discover that the money he had invested in a private school there has been lost. The name of the place, vividly and chillingly described as it is, seems altogether too apt.

Olivia Manning's work in progress, however, of which two parts have now been published, The Great Fortune (1960) and The Spoilt City (1962), is something quite different and promises to be one of the major works of the sixties in English fiction. The first part deals with Bucharest during the first year of the war; the second ends with its occupation by the Germans after the fall of France. The action is necessarily complex and the canvas large…. As a recreation of history in fiction these novels are entirely admirable; the place and the time, the corruption and the sense of doom, seem caught perfectly; and the characters, British and Rumanian alike, are drawn with delicacy and strength, so that they come alive on the page, often absurd, but even so always as suffering human beings. The result is a poignant comedy of a very rare kind.

On this level alone, as recreation of history, these novels are remarkable. But they exist on another level, too, for central to them is the relationship between Harriet and her husband. (pp. 260-61)

This exploration of the relationship between a wife and husband who are utterly different in temperament is very movingly done, and it lies at the heart of the historical tragicomedy Olivia Manning is describing. (p. 262)