"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...