On Friday, the American ambassador to France, Charles Rivkin, held a small ceremony in his garden with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who delivered a fiercely pro-American speech.
This is the American's first interview with a national newspaper since he left his role as Arsenal's chief commercial officer last summer to accept Randy Lerner's offer to take over the day-to-day running of Villa, and he comes across as man who is fiercely determined to deliver success and not expecting a tap on the shoulder any time soon to say the Midlands club will be in new hands.
When the soprano Susanna Phillips delivered a spacious, fiercely articulated account of "Per pietà," Levine gave pinpoint support.
Perhaps more than any other region, the five New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont offer Mr. McCain tailor-made, fiercely independent, moderate voters whose counterparts delivered Mr. McCain primary victories in New Hampshire and Michigan.
Ed Palermo's Big Band has devoted itself to the quick-changing music of Frank Zappa: sometimes fiercely complex, sometimes as simple as three chords, almost always delivered with biting humor.
At other times, she is a fiercely knowledgeable science writer, delivering case studies and research findings with a storyteller's verve.
What if the Mexican film-maker could make good by delivering another fiercely English tale that's just as magical and in many ways far more exotic?
Harriett Baldwin, economic secretary to the Treasury, said: "The CMA's work complements the work the government has already undertaken, and continues to take, to increase competition in banking and create a fiercely competitive market which delivers for consumers and the wider economy".
Yet, more than three years into his term, he has failed to deliver, blaming fiercely divided congressional Republicans who he says are unwilling to work on the issue.
The combativeness with which he delivered these expressions of duty made him one of the most fiercely denounced public figures in New York, if not the country.
