is a vodka martini and a cigarette." Later that week, having moved briefly to a New York hotel, she was woken by a room-service waiter bearing a tray with a huge bottle of vodka and all the ingredients for her drink of choice. She discovered it had been "fixed, God knows how, by the East Timor crowd, the people in the compound". Marie covered conflicts wherever they broke out -- in the Balkans, notably, and in Chechnya and Zimbabwe -- but she was particularly knowledgable about the Arab countries. She was therefore on hand to witness the 2011 revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. In fact, the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi , had taken something of a shine to Marie during her first visit to Tripoli in the 1980s and she was obliged to shake off his unwelcome attention. One of my earliest tasks when I joined the Sunday Times in 1987 was to contact Marie in Libya using a telex machine, because no telephone worked. She skilfully managed to write a coded piece that avoided the censor's pencil. It was my first glimpse of the dedication and determination that was the hallmark of her work. These were characteristics that, in the following years, saw her acknowledged by her peers as Britain's foremost war correspondent. Marie was from an Irish background, born and raised in Oyster Bay, New York. She studied marine biology at Yale before switching to major in English literature while working on the university's paper. From that