The first two volumes of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy are set in Romania in 1939 and 1940, and feature the plots and schemes of the small British expat community in Bucharest as they compete for status and argue the prospects for themselves and the country as war moves toward them. Some are without money, in particular Yakimov, prince of moochers, who is constantly looking to borrow ‘a thou’ — a thousand lei note — on the fiction that he’ll pay it back just as soon as his remittence comes in. The last gesture of David the spy, just before they do clear out, is to overtip a waiter with a 1000-lei note. All of which is to say that this banknote is the ideal bookmark for this set of novels.
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