But the more important the early decisions, the more an adviser is likely to show his true colours.

ECONOMIST: Economics Focus: The PC crowd | The

But he was also disarmingly frank in admitting his own naivety for failing to recognize what he saw as Mr Putin's true colours.

BBC: Boris Berezovsky: Colourful character focused on Russia

When the militants want to resume hostilities, possibly in the spring, the country's Islamist politicians may at last be obliged to reveal their true colours.

ECONOMIST: Tajikistan

IR So The Economist, masquerading as a pseudo-intellectual print medium, has shown its true colours as a boorish tabloid, with its reprehensible obituary of Diana, Princess of Wales.

ECONOMIST: Diana

With these words, say his detractors, Mr Obama showed his true colours as a man who does not believe genuinely in America's greatness and is secretly reconciled to its eventual decline.

ECONOMIST: Lexington

John Bull complains 'Look here, this dark horse you are trying to palm off on me is coming out in his true colours as soon as I begin to rub him down!'

BBC: In pictures: David Lloyd George election posters

He expressed for the first time accurate laws of motion, the origins of colours, the existence and effects of gravity, and the fact that the same physical laws hold true throughout the universe.

ECONOMIST: Isaac Newton