post-war works, which are alternately set at home and abroad, are considered first, less than successful steps in clarifying her ideas about an expatriate war and how to write about it. Novels and stories set in England and Ireland are permeated by staleness and discontent, while those set abroad highlight the excitement and adventure of her later works. Two books set in Jerusalem, The Artist Among the Missing (1949) and School for Love (1951), her first commercial and critical success, are also first steps in exploring themes such war, colonialism and British imperialism. Manning wrote reviews, radio adaptations and scripts and several non-fiction books. Her book The Remarkable Expedition (1947) about Emin Pasha and Henry Stanley was generally well reviewed, and when reissued in 1985 was praised for its humour, story telling and fairness to both subjects. Her travel book about Ireland, The Dreaming Shore (1950), received a mixed review even from her old friend Louis MacNeice, but extracts from this and other of Manning's Irish writing have subsequently been admired and anthologised. Manning's book Extraordinary cats (1967) proved to be chiefly about her own well-loved pets, and Stevie Smith's review in the Sunday Times complained that the book was "more agitated than original". She also published two collections of short stories, the well-reviewed Growing Up (1946) and A Romantic Hero and Other Stories (1967); the latter included eight stories from the earlier volume, and is imbued with a sense of mortality. Themes War In contrast to other women's war fiction of the period, Manning's works do not recount life on the home front. Instead, her Irish and Second World War fiction observe combatants and non-combatants at the front and behind the lines. Wars, in Manning's view, are battles for place and influence, and "with her range of images and illusions, Manning reminds us that wars over land have been a constant". Her books do not celebrate British heroism nor the innocence of civilians, emphasising instead that the causes and dangers of war come as much from within as from without, with the gravest threats coming from fellow Britons. Military men are far from heroic, and official British responses are presented as farcical. In the Fortunes of War, the conflict is viewed largely from the perspective of a civilian woman, an observer, though later books include Simon Boulderstone's soldier's view of battle. Views differ on her success in the Fortunes