of War battlescenes; initial reviews by Auberon Waugh and Hugh Massie criticised them as implausible and not fully realised, but later commentators have describing her depiction of battle as vivid, poignant and largely convincing. Her books serve as an indictment of war and its horrors; William Gerhardie noted in 1954 of Artist among the Missing that "it is war seen in a compass so narrowed down that the lens scorches and all but ignites the paper". There is a strong focus of the impermanence of life; death and mortality are a constant presence and preoccupation for civilian and soldier alike, and repetition – of stories, events and deaths – used to give "the impression of lives trapped in an endless war" for which there is no end in sight. Colonialism and imperialism A major theme of Manning's works is the British empire in decline. Her fiction contrasts deterministic, imperialistic views of history with one that accepts the possibility of change for those displaced by colonialism. Manning's works take a strong stance against British imperialism, and are harshly critical of racism, anti-Semitism and oppression at the end of the British colonial era. "British imperialism is shown to be a corrupt and self-serving system, which not only deserves to be dismantled but which is actually on the verge of being dismantled", writes Steinberg. The British characters in Manning's novels almost all assume the legitimacy of British superiority and imperialism and struggle with their position as oppressors who are unwelcome in countries they have been brought up to believe welcome their colonising influence. In this view, Harriet's character, marginalised as an exile and a woman, is both oppressor and oppressed, while characters such as Guy, Prince Yakimov and Sophie seek to exert various forms of power and authority over others, reflecting in microcosm the national conflicts and imperialism of the British Empire. Phyllis Lassner, who has written extensively on Manning's writing from a colonial and post-colonial perspective, notes how even sympathetic characters are not excused their complicity as colonisers; the responses of the Pringles assert "the vexed relationship between their own status as colonial exiles and that of the colonised" and native Egyptians, though given very little direct voice in The Levant Trilogy, nevertheless assert subjectivity for their country. In The Artist Among the Missing (1949), Manning illustrates the racial tensions that are created when imperialism and multiculturalism mix, and, as in her