Even at the height of his prestige he still nervously auditioned piano reductions of scores before musical apparatchiks.

FORBES: Late-Night Reading Calls for Russian Composers, Not IPads

Both are longtime party apparatchiks and, like Ms Royal, graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, France's elite civil-service college.

ECONOMIST: France��s Socialists

Like Mr Giuliani eight years ago, he is a Republican, with few political debts to the Democrat apparatchiks in City Hall.

ECONOMIST: New York's mayor

Many Federal Reserve managers and apparatchiks believe prosperity is synonymous with inflation.

FORBES: Fact and Comment

Obama administration officials, liberal pundits and Democratic apparatchiks this past week have launched a coordinated attack designed to weaken support for conservative Super PACs.

WSJ: Rove: The Lessons of Defeat for the GOP

But if Mr Assad junior ever comes to power, he might find the greatest threat to his rule coming not from disgruntled apparatchiks, but from Syria's broken-down economy.

ECONOMIST: Syria

It was only after Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's new leader, summoned Mr Yeltsin to Moscow in 1985 that he began to differentiate himself from dozens of other senior party apparatchiks.

ECONOMIST: Russia’s flawed reformer | The