Like Madonna, Lady Gaga and Rihanna, Mr. Timberlake has consistently shown himself a shrewd manipulator of image, Mr. Zee said, conjuring a new persona to telegraph each new shift in career trajectory.
A lawyer known for his shrewd deal-making and tough persona, Mr. Vrdolyak also served as a ward committeeman and chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party before switching to the Republican Party in 1987.
This was cause for amazement among non-British scientists, particularly Americans, but Rutherford, for all his larger-than-life persona, was a shrewd old buzzard, as the Cavendish results showed again and again.
In performances that spanned a half century, the Bronx-born Mr. Orbach came to embody two beloved New York archetypes: the musical matinee idol, to which he gave a refreshingly modern spin with his rugged and idiosyncratic persona, and the shrewd, irascible cop, a role he honed to a razor's edge as Detective Lennie Briscoe on "Law & Order".
Or it would be if not for the shrewd, affecting and occasionally raunchy personas she conjures from the stuff of other people's closets, outfits she assembles and photographs mainly on herself.
"I can't help but think that somehow we're part of this master plan of his," Bailey says playfully of the photographer, whose gifts included the shrewd marketing of his work and persona.
His shrewd, unscrupulous, political touch, his flamboyance, braggadocian talents and persona, overall they remind one, irresistibly, of Donald Trump.
But even if the book seems a little overblown in its praise and sometimes a bit schmaltzy — the Burtons' "Liz and Dick" tabloid personas were "perhaps their greatest roles" — the authors make shrewd observations.
Shrewd enough as the years went by to cultivate her tart-tongued, antique public persona, Alice Longworth herself may have come closest to a correct evaluation of her life when she noted that "the secret of eternal youth is arrested development".
Concurrent with the rise of modern advertising, the creation of Shaw's 'G.B.S.' public persona was achieved through masterful imitation of patent medicine marketing strategies and a shrewd understanding of the relationship between product and spokesman.
