That is what time does to literature

It is seventy plus years since those days through which we live in the two war [Balkan and Levant] trilogies. Olivia Manning died in 1980. I wonder if it matters how much she wrote out of her own direct experience and how much she created from her imagination - 'made up'.

Does it ever matter? Only at the time, perhaps. A decade, or half a century later, it is all one. The books stand or fall by themselves. That is what time does to literature. And these novels stand. They come up fresh every re-reading.

S. Hill, Jacob's room is full of books (2017), 168