series of articles she published in the TLS in 1968. Laski wrote about her experience reading for the OED, detailing her thought process whenever she encountered innovative vocabulary. Consequentially, these articles prompted a letter from Phillip Grove, then Editor of Webster’s International Dictionary. In Grove’s letters, he made a game-changing offer to make the quotation files of Mariam-Webster’s works available for the OED Supplement compilers. This led to an amicable relationship between Mariam-Webster and Oxford in the years to come. Ultimately, in the 1970s, Laski went on to work with Simpson on the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. Together, they filled documentary gaps in the quotations of earlier texts, with Laski willing to put a pause on her word-collecting activities to focus on proverb gathering. Broadcasting Laski was a panellist on the popular UK BBC panel shows What's My Line? (1951–63), The Brains Trust (late 1950s), and Any Questions? (1960s). Overall views An avowed atheist, Laski was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Her play, The Offshore Island, is about nuclear warfare. Critical reception Anthony Boucher described her novella The Victorian Chaise Longue as "an admirably written book, highly skilled in its economic evocation of time, place and character – and a relentlessly terrifying one." Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences has been compared to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James in its importance. Tory Heaven, a counterfactual novel depicting a Britain ruled by a rigidly hierarchical Conservative dictatorship and satirising middle-class attitudes towards the Attlee ministry, was described as "wickedly amusing" by Ralph Straus of The Sunday Times, and as "an ingeniously contrived and wittily told tale" by Hugh Fausset of the Manchester Guardian: writing about the book in 2018, David Kynaston called it a "highly engaging, beautifully written novel". Death Laski died at Royal Brompton Hospital, London, due to a smoking-related lung problem, on 6 February 1988, aged 72. She was survived by her husband and children. Works Love on the Supertax (1944), comic novel Stories of Adventure (1946) The Patchwork Book (1946), editor To Bed with Grand Music (1946), as Sarah Russell Victorian Tales for Girls (1947), editor Tory Heaven or Thunder on the Right (1948), political satire Little Boy Lost (1949), novel Toasted English (US edition of Tory Heaven) (1949) Mrs Ewing, Mrs Molesworth and Mrs Hodgson Burnett (1950), biography The Village (1952) novel, reprinted 2004 It