Even at 19 he played a doddery old man in a production of JM Barrie's play Mary Rose.

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In his public appearances he has seemed fit, if doddery and occasionally forgetful.

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Doddery, clueless, fearful and divided it could be Donald Rumsfeld talking about old Europe.

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Despite all the hair-dye, Botox and revitalising drugs pumped into him by his doctors, Africa's oldest leader has appeared increasingly doddery of late.

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Peter de Jersey's Horatio is wonderfully endearing, Oliver Ford Davies is hilarious as doddery old Polonius, while Mariah Gale's Ophelia has a haunting vulnerability.

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If we take his doddery appearance at face value, he is the CEO of a publicly traded company, controls about 40% of it, and appears out of touch with what is going on in the company.

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Government grumpy, doddery and sometimes bent still looms large.

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There are home-grown successes, too witness the transformation of a doddery East German combine, Carl Zeiss of Jena, in Thuringia, into the technology group Jenoptik, with world sales of DM2.6 billion and a first public share issue last month that was one of the hits of the season.

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Frail and doddery for his 75 years, suffering from Parkinson's and other diseases, holed up in humiliation in a bombed-out office block in Palestine's benighted West Bank for the past three-and-half years, occasionally threatened by Israel's leaders with expulsion and even assassination, he is widely considered, in the end, a flop.

ECONOMIST: Palestine and Israel