In his celebrated 2002 interview with Saddam Hussein, George Galloway, the Respect MP, underlined the difference between the "surprisingly diffident" person who had flattered him in Baghdad and the reputation of the "most demonised man on the planet".
I've gone from being a very reserved, diffident person to being a much more open and expressive individual.
Both are diffident, cool personalities.
When we meet on the UK leg of his publicity tour, Powers – in person thoughtful, diffident, intriguingly tattooed – is happy to acknowledge their shared "biographical and geographical details", although he "didn't lose a friend the way Bartle did".
In person, Mr. Sorokin is diffident and thoughtful; a former stutterer, he releases words into the air around him as carefully as a cashier counting out change.
Yet in person she is quiet, almost diffident, her dark eyes downcast.
(Quoting cannot convey the impression her line, in both text and image, gives; it's thin, diffident, almost quavery, like a very old person's voice. The word "unfamiliar" is written in tiny zigzags, like a polygraph having a nervous breakdown).
It's true that, in person, you start to wonder how this rather fey, diffident man has managed to cause so much outrage.
Frank, a more secular creature and a more diffident fellow, lives in the confines of his own first-person narration — ruminating, hesitating, doubting and continually banging his shins against the puzzling, intractable mundane.
Ayoade is similarly diffident.
Consumers, however, remain diffident.
