Because otherwise, Mr. Costello, the eminent post-punk eclectic, and the Roots, hip-hop's protean house band, gave an extended lesson in collaborative thrift, beefing up some of his old songs and cleanly tackling most of their new ones.
The view of him as uppermost an establishmentarian was only reinforced in 1974, when he attained what is considered the pre-eminent post in English literary criticism: the King Edward VII chair of English literature at King's College, Cambridge University, an appointment made by the crown at the suggestion of the prime minister.
Mr. Jiang, who is 76 and has been the party's general secretary since 1989, is widely expected to hand off that pre-eminent post to Vice President Hu Jintao, 59, at a major party congress this fall, in keeping with an emerging norm that senior officials should not take new positions after age 70.
Lebanon's latest car bomb assassination appears to be closely tied to the first major such operation in the current series, the killing of Rafiq al-Hariri, the country's pre-eminent post-civil war statesman, in February 2005.
Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s had been encouraged to speak out, somewhat equivocally by the pre-eminent post-Mao leader Deng Xiaoping and more forthrightly by Deng's deputy, General Secretary Hu Yaobang.
Why did the purported replacements of the 1960s Convair CV-240, Fokker F-27 Friendship, Avro 748 and Handley Page Herald fail to dislodge the DC-3 from its pre-eminent position in post-war air travel?
Of those, 70% had chosen an eminent spot.
Stanton, who had favored another, more senior officer for the pre-eminent medical post, found Hammond's personality insufferable and his incessant demands excessive.
Since his appointment to Pakistan's pre-eminent intelligence post in March, General Islam has maintained a conspicuously low profile in Pakistan.
