Watching the cortege of Harry Cohn, much-hated head of Columbia Pictures, pass through the crowd-lined streets of Beverly Hills, Groucho observed: "Give the people what they want they'll turn out".
There was one moment during the impeccable choreography of Margaret Thatcher's funeral cortege arriving at St Paul's that felt eerily unseemly: the coffin, with its union flag shroud, draped in white flowers, on a gun carriage behind a posse of elegant horses.
Hence perhaps the insularity of England's blue-nylon machine, with its glazed and sealed hotel-room culture, slouching from lobby to breakfast buffet to meeting room, nannied by its cortege of wonks and fluffers.
Tens of thousands joined his cortege in Nablus.
About 1m Jordanians lined the route of the king's cortege.
This fits France's sense of secular, revolutionary History, carrying the country forward, however fitfully, like an "endless cortege proceeding towards the light", in the words of Jules Ferry, a 19th-century educationalist.
For many years women were not allowed to follow the cortege, and only the wives of Brahmans could walk around the pyre.
In Venezuela, masked beasts of the former Maipure puberty dance, mauari, threatened a pubescent girl and her cortege and had to be subdued magically.
