It's this record of who you are, your persona.

They develop a persona, a signature style, much like fashion designers.

I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn't do.

Then I became an adult and started knowing who I was, and tried to maintain that persona I became creative.

Costa Rica created the Consejo Nacional de la Persona Adulta Mayor and is implementing several programmes and services, with a strong emphasis on inter institutional arrangements.

The humour feels as if it is pitched at kids rather than adults, and for me Johnny English's wacky misadventures aren't as inventive and focused as Atkinson's silent movie gags in the persona of Bean.

And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona.

Ironically however, as he was dying, world leaders and the media were rediscovering the importance of Arafat s leadership if not his persona. The sustained focus of the media on him, to the point of near saturation, focused world attention on the Palestinian Question once again.

Of course, as former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson used to say, a week is a long time in politics, and Sarkozy will officially become a candidate only this week. Yet it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him to prevent the upcoming election from becoming an emotional and negative referendum on his persona.

When the deputy head of the presidential administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, said during a recent Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi that Putin is Russia and Russia is Putin, he was expressing a profound Russian reality. In no other country has the ruler s persona from Catherine the Great and Ivan the Terrible to Lenin and Stalin made such a deep mark on national history.