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“... Klansmen gave themselves, to denote ranks within the organisation. The overall top man was called Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire, and immediately beneath him were ten Genii. If a Klansman was in charge of a whole state (or, in Klanspeak, ‘realm’), he called himself a Grand Dragon, if you please, and his assistants ...”

“... audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of these figures much resembles the ‘short, stout, elderly man, his hair cut en brosse’ that Agatha Christie describes. Well, they often manage the stout bit, but for the rest they are tallish, more like ...”

“... Now comes Scott Hicks’s Shine, an equally arty but commercially viable biopic about a man – David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) – who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott’s very first words are: ‘Kissed them all, I kissed them all, always kissed cats, puss-cats, kissed them, always did; if a cat’d let me ...”

“... at the head. Jean-Baptiste was sent to the prestigious Jesuit Collège de Clermont (later Louis-le-Grand) and then briefly studied law, perhaps at Orléans. Meanwhile, he had caught stage-fever, possibly through his grandfather, who is said to have taken him to the playhouses of Paris, where Corneille was making his name. In 1642, he scandalised his father by ...”

“... more. My ailing, failing memory was sorely tested the other day. ‘Do you remember who won the Grand National?’ I was asked. Of course I did. It was the most exciting race for years, won right at the post by ... Then came the blank. I’d sat and watched the race, goddam it, but the winner still eluded me, just as it had at the time. By the same ...”

“... and ill-considered) reaction against the generous concessions made to Egypt at Camp David: the war in the Lebanon was the second. Arik Sharon, who dates the start of his planning the war from the day he took office as Minister of Defence in July 1981, spelled out his views in a (Jewish) New Year issue of the muck-raking weekly Ha’olam ...”

“... under the influence of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, first developed as a kind of grand-scale, synthetic history in which the data of ethnography were used as illustrations of a priori theories of social evolution or historical diffusion, it later developed into a self-consciously non-historical field of study. The basis for this reversal was ...”

“... reveres de Gaulle, but looks on Napoleon with something like embarrassed disdain. Napoleon has no grand Parisian squares named after him, only the relatively minor rue Bonaparte. In the great monument to French memory edited by Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, the only essay on him concerns the pathos-laden return of his body to France in 1840. Which is to ...”

“... Life: A User’s Manual is an exception, though it has clearly taxed the ingenuity of David Bellos. A chapter of humorous visiting-cards, for example, produces only one instantly cross-cultural item (‘Madeleine Proust: “Souvenirs” ’ – not one of Perec’s subtlest efforts). Luckily there are occasions when a bon mot in French can be ...”

“... organised by the installation artist Isaac Julien, is preceded by a video interview with David Harvey for those who missed ‘Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey’ on his website. It’s a world away from the sunshine of the gardens and spritzs on the terrace (the product of another empire that claimed the ...”

“... tall and I’m not dumb,’ Shteyngart’s text says, and Beigbeder echoes: ‘Je suis assez grand et pas trop con.’ Idiomatic and loyal. Then the English says: ‘I dress smartly and I don’t drink. I don’t play Xbox but I love the ladies.’ This becomes: ‘Je m’habille affreusement mal mais bois tout le temps, j’ai arrêté la coke mais ...”

“... Late one evening, leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy, I ran into David Carritt, who told me he had come across a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and Child in use as an ashtray.’ The narrator is Sir John Pope-Hennessy and his nocturnal encounter was with one of the most hawk-eyed art-dealers in Europe ...”

“... In a speech​  at the University of East London in February 2010 David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, promised to lift the lid on ‘secret corporate lobbying’. The ‘far too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money’, he said, would end on his watch. The full text of his speech isn’t easy to find – the Conservative Party erased ten years’ worth of speeches and press releases from its website in 2013 – but the internet doesn’t forget ...”

“... his first Hitchcock film, Suspicion (1941), as a rascal intent on killing his wife (the lovely, grand but slightly fatuous Joan Fontaine – she got an Oscar, too). Some of these films may not be as good as the others (there are Velázquezes like that), but in four years Grant had changed screen acting. Other guys won the Oscars – His Girl Friday was ...”

“... David Lockwood is the sociologist’s sociologist in the same way that Ken Rosewall used to be the tennis player’s tennis player: he’s the one the other pros turn out to watch. But you need to know the fixture list. To switch to an older metaphor, he is apt not only to hide his light under a bushel but to hide the bushel as well ...”