In some ways the current travails of Goldman Sachs (see article) epitomise the problem.

ECONOMIST: Shareholders v stakeholders

She soon came to epitomise a creature now threatened with extinction: the public intellectual.

ECONOMIST: Cultural critics

Council house sales, financial deregulation, privatisation and recapturing the Falklands: They epitomise what we now call Thatcherism.

BBC: Margaret Thatcher: How will history judge her?

Mr Rubio, by contrast, embodies the future the party sees for itself, as the champion of the sort of hard work and self-reliance that so many immigrants epitomise.

ECONOMIST: Lexington

Nobody suffered more from the rise of Mr Dean than the patrician senator from Massachusetts, who seemed to epitomise the Democratic establishment that had supposedly kowtowed to Mr Bush.

ECONOMIST: The Democratic primaries

Each family member is held to epitomise some recurring problem which is, in Ms Hirsi Ali's view, characteristic of patriarchal societies, especially when they are uprooted but trying desperately to cling to the old ways.

ECONOMIST: No time for tradition

But the elevations of John Thain (Bank of America-Merrill Lynch) and, above all, Sir Win Bischoff, chairman of Citigroup and a City grandee par excellence, epitomise the prevailing mood of prudence at the expense of risk.

ECONOMIST: Introducing the winners of 2009

Tax havens epitomise unfairness, cheating and injustice.

FORBES: Why Tax Havens Are A Force For Good

Indeed, since the difficulties of helping Sierra Leone seemed so intractable, and since Sierra Leone seemed to epitomise so much of the rest of Africa, it began to look as though the world might just give up on the entire continent.

ECONOMIST: Hopeless Africa