In the 1960's and 1970's, Vietnam and the civil rights movement were largely, although not entirely, overlooked: the best picture Oscar for 1968, the most contentious year of a deeply contentious decade, went to "Oliver!"

In the early 1950s, he played a crucial role in policing decolonisation in the British Empire, developing a model of public service policing that proved deeply contentious in some colonies but which time has shown to have been acute and prudent.

The political leaders must now tackle other deeply contentious issues in the talks to form a government.

The move added a new twist to the deeply contentious project to build a Russian-designed light-water reactor in Iran, a decade-old deal that is a factor in the United States' concerns over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

After hours of passionate and sometimes angry debate, the largest university teachers' union in Britain voted in an emergency session on Thursday to overturn its deeply contentious boycott of two Israeli universities.

The result is a feud that has roiled the New York photo world, a small but deeply contentious and pressurized part of the city's economy.

With that, for the first time the deeply contentious issue of the future of New York's water system erupted into open hostilities between City Hall and the Comptroller's office.

Public sculpture is a deeply contentious area, as Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani may have recently discovered when he created a ruckus by proposing to install a statue of Frank Sinatra in Times Square.

The referral had been quoted as relating to the "deeply contentious question about how to assess the patentability of software-related inventions".

Indeed, some of the continent's most important figures say privately that British membership in the euro - a deeply contentious issue in Britain, but crucial to greater British influence in the continent's affairs - is no longer in doubt.