In District 10, Ms. Zardoya now has an inner circle of six: a deputy superintendent for administration, a deputy superintendent for student support services, an assistant superintendent for literacy, an assistant superintendent for educational initiatives, an assistant superintendent for operations and a director of planning and communications.
In Malaysia, he joins the circle of Anwar Ibrahim, the deputy prime minister and, to many liberal Muslims, the nearest this fallen world has to the perfect man.
He likes to avoid casual contact with the press and stay within his own self-affirming circle (including Deputy Secretary of State Karl Rove).
Mr. Sobyanin, 55, is relatively new to Mr. Putin's close circle of aides, though he previously served as a deputy prime minister and as head of the presidential administration under his successor and protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev.
He is the author of the new novel The Circle of Thirteen He spent a few years as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and then as a poverty lawyer in Oakland, California, before going into private practice.
As deputy mayors under Rudolph W. Giuliani, they were the inner circle of lieutenants, running perhaps the most centralized and iron- fisted municipal government in modern New York history.
Steve Kappes, now deputy director of the CIA, was part of the circle of trust too.
Cheryl Mills, who was the deputy White House counsel in Clinton's second term, became Hillary's chief of staff at the State Department and today is a central figure in the wide circle of friends and advisers known as Hillaryland.
Her loving circle of friends.
