Fortunes of war

This is the name of a TV series that first screened, well, back in the 80s I think. It's all been posted on youTube and very enjoyable it is too. Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh star, and lots of other English actors like Rupert Graves, a very young Rupert Graves, fresh from Room with a view. What a cutie.  The series is from the books The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, written by Olivia Manning, worth tracking down, but probably not in print at the moment.
    One of the sad results of our earthquakes is the closure of numerous second-hand bookshops. These were usually located in low-rent, run-down shops in the older part of the city centre and the older suburbs. One of my favourites, Smiths Bookshop, has now reopened in Woolston. The old shop was a constant wonder, three rickety floors of all sorts of books on all sorts of topics. The upstairs was particularly Dickensian, a narrow staircase leading to a large attic, with views down into the street and onto a dark back alley. When I first started going there as a child and into my teens, the shop was owned and run by Mr Oberg. He was a constant wonder too. Whatever you wanted, be it poetry or a motor manual, he always knew where in the shop a copy would be found. The area around the counter was always stacked with cardboard boxes full of books that people had bought in, waiting to be sorted onto the shelves. After Mr Oberg died, his wife and family continued to run the shop for some time, but then it was sold to some less congenial operators and was never really the same. Just prior to the earthquakes, the shop moved to another location further down the street, as the old building was becoming too old for safety. Just as well they moved; the whole (empty) place collapsed. The new old shop was badly damaged as well, and Smith's bookshop had only an online prescence for some time. I hope to make a trip over in the next few days (it's only in the next suburb) and indulge in the delights of old books again.
     I've gone off contemporary authors of late; few seem to know how to write well, and just rehash the same plot with different characters. So many seem to be about a character who goes back to his/her hometown after death of spouse/parent/grandparent, to discover the 'truth' behind the lives they thought they knew. If I've read one plot summary like this, I've read a hundred.  So back to the old novels, the Waughs, Mitfords, Greenes and Mannings, real writers who knew that writing was more than just putting one word in front of another.