The situation is rather different when a traditionally white character becomes black.
But Russia is not the West, and in the course of interviewing dozens of people in Russia about their views on Putin in the last month, I found that the perception of the man is rather different when looked at through the prism of Russia's own culture.
Whether public or private, owners should be interested in maximising the value of the company, encouraging the management to change or, if it is unable or unwilling to do so, replacing it.The reality is rather different, especially when most of the shareholders have received their shares for free.
The reality is rather different, as Deutsche Bank found when its approaches to France's SG and Crédit Lyonnais were spurned by the French authorities.
Papers such as London's Evening Standard, which first reported this week's poll, emphasise the "halo effect" of last year's jubilee, when the percentage of those wanting to keep the monarchy rose to high of 80%; Smith says that the picture, from his point of view, is rather different: "On 16 November 2010, when William's wedding was announced, right on that day we had a spike of people phoning up.
While most of today's architects would rather not become fodder for the gossip columns, things were rather different nearly 100 years ago when Addison Mizner, the architect most credited with plotting the Moorish- and Spanish-inspired architectural style of that gilded stretch of social nirvana known as the Florida Gold Coast, certainly enjoyed his column inches.
And yet the word, when it came, was rather different from what Gordon-watchers have grown used to.
