As Pope Benedict's visit to the UK comes to an end, I am left with a sense of sadness. Despite the words of Archbishop Vincent Nichols, attempting to paint the visit as he would perhaps have wished it to be – an endorsement of pluralism and a call to quiet dialogue rather than shrill confrontation, it seems hard to imagine a clearer example of differing cultures failing to understand each other than we have observed over the past few days.

There are some authors whose speaking voice one hears clearly when reading their written words.

“I hear those voices that will not be drowned”. These words from Peter Grimes are pierced through the four metre high sculpture by Maggi Hambling which stands on the beach at Aldeburgh in celebration of the life and work of Benjamin Britten. Read against the Suffolk sky, they go straight to the heart.

Looking a gift horse in the mouth is generally thought graceless and discourteous. But when the donor is a multi-millionaire ex-Prime Minister who took his country into a war of dubious legality and certain immorality, and the recipient is a charitable project for injured service personnel, the convention may justifiably be set aside.

“Money pads the edges of things”. EM Forster puts these words in the mouth of the wealthy Margaret Schlegel in Howards End.

The parliamentary constituency of Penrith and the Border is both the largest and the most sparsely populated in England.

As the coalition's plans for reducing public services to an ineffectual rump and for implementing cuts in benefits which will cause real hardship to the most vulnerable begin to take horrifying shape,

Bereavement, betrayal, unemployment, mental illness, abuse, crime – in every community and in every week of every year, lives fracture and crumble under the strain of the 'tears of things'.

Charles Windsor is evidently not acquainted with the law of holes.

When it comes to modifying behaviour, there are arguments to be made for both sticks and carrots.