[Olivia Manning's The Battle Lost and Won] displays all her impressive talent. The writing is spare, witty and dry; the characterization so precise and so discreet you are hardly aware of the skill. This is naturalism deployed with a high degree of art. Miss Manning catches the essential feeling of place and action, and has succeeded brilliantly in the unusual feat for a woman of describing war. The battle scenes, for various reasons, are among the best in the book. Miss Manning's readers are prepared for her skill in conducting her cast through a series of comic manoeuvres in exotic but seedy surroundings, and the Cairo sequences in this novel are convincing and entertaining, though they lack the clarity of mood and vividness of feeling of the desert war scenes. This must be intentional, for Olivia Manning looks at Alamein through the eyes of a young man to...