Those who passed were given degrees often called doctorates (jinshi) and promptly took an additional palace examination, nominally presided over by the emperor, on the basis of which they were ranked in order of excellence.
But for one thing: Mr Smith is the creature of the chancellor, Gordon Brown, and Mr Brown sees the department over which Mr Smith nominally presided as a dependent province of the Treasury.
True, Napoleon is nominally present, presiding with a stern semi-smile over the proceedings from within a copy of a Jacques-Louis David portrait.
To his mind, that means a lieutenant governor independent of the governor and determined to force change in the fractious State Senate, of which the lieutenant governor is nominally the presiding officer.
The clash of armies is not to be heard during "Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812," the vibrant, transporting new musical adapted from a potent slice of Tolstoy's "War and Peace". True, Napoleon is nominally present, presiding with a stern semi-smile over the proceedings from within a copy of a Jacques-Louis David portrait.
Nominally, the deputies and presiding officers of the soviets at all levels were elected by the citizenry, but there was only one candidate for any office in these elections, and the selection of candidates was controlled by the Communist Party.
The company's local franchisee, a Harvard-educated, Vietnamese-American tech tycoon, is the son-in-law of Nguyen Tan Dung, the prime minister, who presides over a nominally communist nation.
The Republicans are holding their first convention in this overwhelmingly Democratic town, presided over by a nominally Republican mayor who has to worry about his own standing with that mostly Democratic public.
Mr. Maliki has presided over an unwieldy power-sharing government, which nominally gives prominent roles to Sunnis but in reality has resulted in political stasis, and he has signaled in recent months that he would prefer to move to a majority government, dominated almost solely by Shiites.
The interim government presided over by Mr. Bedoui and Mr. Bensalah is nominally in charge.
