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Acknowledgements T his study engaged me over a number of years, and I am indebted to many people for their help in bringing it to completion. My thanks are due, first and foremost, to Olivia Manning’s close friend and literary executor Francis King, a most considerate correspondent whose death occurred as this book went to press, and also to the late Neville Braybrooke, who supported the project in its earliest days. Several individuals read chapters in draft form and offered valuable observations, including Roy Foster, Gerald Dawe, Nicholas Allen and Mark Rawlinson. I must also thank Gerry Harrison for his time and generosity with sources, and Vesna Goldsworthy, whose own research opened many doors for me. Conversations with Derek Mahon, John Fairleigh, Heather Ingman, Eunan O’Halpin, Bill McCormack, John Scattergood, Jeremy Treglown, Ian MacNiven and Lavinia Greacen helped keep me on track, as did those happy hours spent with Richard Pine, Emilie Pine, Ronan Kelly, Anthony Hirst, James Gifford and my associates at the Durrell School of Corfu. Victoria Orr-Ewing, Carol Taaffe, Edwina Keown, Simon Workman and Niamh Dowdall assisted with references; Jean Levy, Poul Pedersen and Siobhan Savage sent copies of obscure material; Caroline Walsh at the Irish Times gave me space to develop ideas. I’m grateful for so many things (in this book and beyond it) to my Romanian colleagues at the universities of Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Timişoara, particularly Mihaela Irimia, Liliana Pop and Pia Brinzeau, and to my trusted colleagues in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. Special thanks must go to the librarians at the McFarlin Collection in the University of Tulsa, the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas, the British Library, London, and to the treasured staff of Trinity College Library, Dublin. I should like to thank David Higham Associates for access to Olivia Manning’s unpublished writings and for permission to quote from her fiction and correspondence. For textual quotations and excerpts, I must also acknowledge her publishers at Heinemann, Penguin and Mandarin Paperbacks (an imprint of Reed Consumer Books Ltd). My sincere gratitude goes to Jonathan Williams, who read the typescript with his customary expertise, and to my patient editor Maria O’Donovan at Cork University Press. Finally, warmest thanks to my husband Kevin Smith, tireless proofreader and companion on this long journey. ...

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