Whereas Mr Ramadan comes across as prickly and humourless, Ms Hirsi Ali plays up her glamorous feminine side.

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The line is not entirely humourless, with stickers of a hula-hooping watermelon and a happy orange waving a pennant.

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Miss Leavitt comes across as a sort of wraith humourless and often ill, and rumoured to haunt the observatory after her death.

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His characters, particularly his women, were cardboard, his writing humourless and clumsy.

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His critics say he's inexperienced in the wily arts of politics, and too obdurate and humourless to succeed in India's fiercely competitive political world.

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But the scriptwriters' attempts to tone down the comedy, made Dalton's Bond in The Living Daylights and A Licence To Kill, a dark, vulnerable, humourless man.

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In particular, the conceit of linking his research to the ups and downs of his relationship with a tiresomely pro-communist (and humourless) girlfriend from East Germany is jarringly intrusive and self-referential.

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Gauging the hysterical and enthusiastic audience reaction, we may well get a good review, unless either of those people was the totally humourless man who sat, stony faced through the whole thing.

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Mr O'Brien can also be somewhat humourless, offering copious quotations from the chairman of Nevada's Gaming Commission without mustering the merest smile at the fact that his name happens to be Bill Bible.

ECONOMIST: Gambling