at the end of the row, chanting humourlessly "My sexy ass has got him in the new dimension/I'm ready to do something to relieve this mission," the Turkish players would have one foot in the final.

She fought across the whole of America, unceasingly, humourlessly, her vocal cords turning to

She shrank from any form of publicity and hated reviews, particularly from the "Freudian school" of criticism: far from being flattered that Graham Greene considered her a formative influence on his writing with her "selective realism, which takes emotion for granted and puts aside love and death with a gentle detachment", she humourlessly rebuked him for suggesting in the same essay that the darkness of Mr Tod might have signalled some emotional trauma in her life.