[The Battle Lost and Won, the second volume in Ms Manning's 'Levant Trilogy',] seems likely to form one of the duller chapters in that meta-novel she began assembling in the Balkan stories. Situated, like its predecessor, in Cairo, the narrative contrasts the bloodiness of Alamein with the nervy boredom of the British sundowner set. Watching Manning's lucid prose squander itself on the nightclub patter, personal intrigues and marital beefs of a coterie including numerous veterans of her previous fictions suggests that, in some larger scheme, this would be where the story paused to tidy up loose ends. Despite claims to stand 'in its own right', this novel is strictly for its author's regulars…. It would certainly require larger resources of ironic portraiture than Manning has yet shown to imbue cocktails at the Anglo-Egyptian Union with any allure. And so while an undeniably high competence shows clearly through accounts of the desert battle, reminders of the debilitating price of national glory appear as sentimental irrelevancies when preached over casualties without fictional stuffing from the start.