The result of Monday’s vote on women bishops, the Archbishop of York stipulated, must be greeted in silence, as is the convention at the General Synod. This, perhaps, was a misjudgment: it would have been more natural, surely, to allow an instantaneous mass-whooping for joy and an outbreak of uninhibited Anglican hugging, rather than to force everyone to sit tight through two or three tedious extra amendments and then to make them all stand up and start singing and swaying to ‘We Are Marching in the Light of God’, which was what happened.

   Jerusalem It’s the moral equivalence which is so devastating. When Egypt this week proposed its ceasefire in Gaza, a BBC presenter asked whether both sides would now conclude that there was no point carrying on with the war. From the start, restraint has been urged on both sides — as if more than 1,100 rocket attacks on Israel in three weeks had the same weight as trying to stop this onslaught once and for all. Israel has been bombing Gaza solely to stop Hamas and its associates from trying to kill Israeli citizens.

In 2012, David Rudisha, a Masai warrior from Kenya, ran what many say was the greatest race in the history of the Olympics. He led the 800m final from the front and smashed his own world record, becoming the first man ever to run under 1.41. In the words of Seb Coe, ‘Bolt was good, Rudisha was magnificent.’ In interviews after the race he thanked one man above all others for his success: an Irish Catholic missionary named Brother Colm O’Connell — a man with no official athletics training who had nonetheless been David’s coach since he first began to run.

Prague, ‘Golden Prague’, is rich in music, architecture, glassware, pilsner and natural beauty. It is one of those places where laughter — innocent laughter, not laughter in the dark — seems a natural response. It is a playful city, and the people are playful, gentle, ironic. Above all, it is a writer’s city. The Czechs, be they Bohemians or Moravians, have literature in their blood. Tomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, was a philosopher.