By all appearances, Ahmad Chalabi reached the pinnacle of influence in Washington four months ago, when he took a seat of honor right behind Laura Bush at the president's State of the Union address.
Founded in 1955 in small, cluttered, Dickensian offices in Manhattan, with a circulation of 16,000, the magazine rose by the 1980s to a pinnacle of influence, with 100,000 readers and Reagan, its ideological godchild, in the White House.
It was during the 1960s that Warburg reached the pinnacle of his influence.
It was the biggest gathering of Irish people ever in one place – and the pinnacle of the influence of Catholicism on the Irish state.
QUESTION FROM GUEST: Mr. Packer: You write that after 2000, Grossman both reached the pinnacle of his influence and then soon had his worldview swamped by waves of violence?
Marsha Rowe Geoffrey Robertson writes: Richard Neville reached the pinnacle of his influence in the summer of 1971, on his release from prison on bail after an Oz trial that had produced more letters to the Times than the Suez crisis.
The Terry Schiavo right-to-die debacle of March 2005 in which prominent Republicans, including the president, conspired to pass a law specifically designed to overrule the Florida judges who had granted Schiavo's husband the right to remove her feeding tube marked the pinnacle of theocon influence.
During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, Xuanxue reached the pinnacle of its influence when it was admitted into the official curriculum of the imperial academy.
These players (I call those at the pinnacle "flexians") glide across roles of influence in government, business, media, and think tanks, use overlapping affiliations and information gleaned in one venue in other venues, and exploit a stranglehold on (should-be) public information to advance their own interests, not the public interest.
Handicraft production no longer sufficed as a means of rising to the pinnacle of society, and, as a result, the power and influence of the guilds declined.
In the process, it demonstrates that Vermeer's miraculous images, the pinnacle of this illusionism, emanated from a petri dish of precedent, influence, inspiration, collaboration and patronage that contained more than a jot of pure chance, including an assassination.
