ITALY: In 1954 the veteran Italian journalist Giorgio Bocca took up a new job at the magazine L'Europeo. "The first thing I heard was the voice of Oriana Fallaci. She was screaming at a compositor," he said. His recollection is of a colleague who combined "vitality and boorishness".
As that bitter-sweet epitaph implies, Oriana Fallaci, who died early yesterday in a Florence hospital, aged 76, is not an easy person to sum up. Energetic, egotistical, passionate, pushy, brave and bigoted are all adjectives that could be applied to a woman who, for several years, was probably Europe's best-known journalist.
In a long career she put her rumbustious prose at the service of many liberal causes. But in her final years, after the September 11th attacks on America in 2001, she became a spokeswoman for the crudest sort of Islamophobia.
In three books attacking Islam and the West's alleged blindness to the threat it poses, she argued there was no distinction to be made between militant Islamism and Muslims.
"God, what people!" she wrote in her first book. They were all potential terrorists, all bent on imposing their religion by force and by stealth, in the form of illegal immigration.
"Sometimes," she wrote, "I would see the image, for me symbolic (therefore infuriating), of the big tent with which the Somali Muslims disfigured, smeared with shit and profaned for three months Piazza Del Duomo in Florence. My city. A tent raised to curse and condemn and insult the Italian government that was hosting them but would not give them the necessary documents to run around Europe and would not let them bring into Italy their hordes of their relatives."
To Massimo Baldini, a minister under Berlusconi and founder of a movement that aimed to secure for Ms Fallaci a life seat in the Italian senate, "she maintained with courage, and notwithstanding intimidation and a chorus of protest from the left, positions we believe are widely supported by the Italian people."
Nobel prize-winning actor and playwright Dario Fo said yesterday he was saddened to hear of her death, but could not overlook the fact that her writing had won her a following among those who "let themselves be guided by rancorous prejudice".
Confirmation of the influence of this self-declared atheist came in September 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI invited her to meet him at his summer residence outside Rome.
An important reason why people listened to her views was that Ms Fallaci was by no means a life-long conservative. As a girl she had helped the Resistance in Tuscany and was honoured for her contribution.
Her affair with the poet and politician Alexandros Panagoulis inspired her to write a novel, Un Uomo (A Man), published after his death.
Though disowned by feminists, Ms Fallaci was unquestionably a literary campaigner on behalf of women. Her 1975 Letter to a Child Never Born is regarded by many as her finest work.
Fallaci interviewed Henry Kissinger in 1972 and said of him: "This too famous, too important, too lucky man, whom they call Superman, Superstar, Superkraut . . . this incredible, inexplicable, unbearable personage."
He later called the interview, where he characterised himself as a lone cowboy riding on a horse into town, "the most disastrous I ever had with any member of the press".