The territory over which they were to deal has long vied with Birmingham for the title of England's "second city".
City- and state-level politicians vied to restrict migrant access to public services.
We learn not only how the light fell from the windows, but how it reflected from the carpets and brocades that vied for attention with the netsuke nestled on green velvet in their black lacquer vitrine, and how it grew greyer when wartime privations in Vienna limited the cleaning of the glass.
And ministers from Bastiat's own country, France, have vied with one another to denounce all talk of further reform to the EU's common agricultural policy.
The fact that North Koreans were so much better off in the cold-war days (when China and the Soviet Union vied to provide aid) sadly reinforces the nostalgia: the people in Mr Kim's broken country earn less, eat less and use less electricity than they did 25 years ago.Yet this misery explains why the hints of change on the economic front may yet lead to something.
Officials made no secret of Mr Obama's impatience with last year's summit in Prague, at which he had to endure speeches by 27 European leaders who all then vied for a photo-op with the new American president.Mr Obama's ennui is striking given the otherwise intense traffic between Washington, DC, and Brussels.
Thereafter, America vied with the Soviet Union for supremacy in aerospace's equivalent of "mine's bigger than yours", as successively taller rockets lobbed larger payloads further afield.The legacy of all this posturing is a view of space travel as a macho, gung-ho affair, all about the conquest of the solar system by men with shiny suits and very big rockets.
MMA has since grown in popularity in both the United States and Europe, and has moved from fringe venues and the outer reaches of the cable television dial to snazzier sports arenas (usually attached to Las Vegas casinos) and broadcast networks.When MMA was first brought to America, a number of promotion companies vied to organise events.
Officials, desperate to prove their loyalty to the Kim cult, vied for honours.
Last year was typical, as the firms vied to launch the biggest eurobond issue, to announce the biggest new credit facility, and so on.
The surge in construction has been compared by a few commentators to Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, when local governments vied with one other in their increasingly implausible claims of soaring output.
