Whenever I hear voices complaining about being charged to visit our great cathedrals, says Peter Hitchens in The Spectator, I reply: “Stop moaning and pay up!” Who else is going to provide the money to save these astounding, irreplaceable buildings for a future in which they may once again be full of worshippers? If you want to see how it should be done, slip across to France which, “I reluctantly admit”, has cathedrals almost as good as ours. They have been owned and wisely maintained by the state since 1905, “and it shows”.

I remember hurrying one evening from Chartres station to the cathedral, hoping to catch it in the sunset light. And I did. “The blaze of majesty from the west window is something I shall never forget.” The cathedral in Strasbourg is one of the greatest buildings in the world. At High Mass on Sunday, the procession to the altar is escorted by men in plumed tricorn hats, one of them rhythmically whacking the stone floor with his halberd. There is a lot of incense. On my last visit, the great church rang its mightiest bell, “audible well across the Rhine in Germany”, to mark the death of our queen – one great reverberating stroke for each of her 96 years. We ought to marvel more at these places: in France, the carved stone oxen and high white towers of Laon, and the ferociously grim exterior of Le Puy; in England, the triplet spires and rich red stones of Lichfield, and the scissor arches and moated palace of Wells. “You don’t know how lucky you are, and will not know what you have got till it has gone.”

Every good newspaper keeps a list of forbidden words and phrases, says Paul Clements in The Independent. And Simon Heffer’s uproarious guide to house style at the Telegraph is one of the best. It includes “bloodbath” (trite tabloid hyperbole for political loss), “mastermind” (especially in crime and political reporting), “orgy”, unless specifically describing an actual bacchanalian “happening” – a noun that ought to be banned everywhere. “Legendary” must only be used when referring to ancient legends. And Telegraph readers do not eat “Christmas dinner”, only “Christmas lunch”.

In 1983, says Steven Kurutz in The New York Times, the journalist Graydon Carter was writing a profile of a brash 37-year-old Manhattan real estate developer called Donald Trump. “For a tall guy,” Carter told his friend Kurt Andersen over lunch, “he has the shortest fingers I’ve ever seen.” So began one of the New York media world’s longest-running – and silliest – feuds. When, shortly afterwards, Carter and Andersen founded the monthly satirical magazine Spy, they made a point of referring to Trump as the “short-fingered vulgarian”. Trump hated it. In 2015, weeks before he announced his candidacy for president, he sent Carter a clipping of a magazine advert for The Art of the Deal, with his hands circled and a handwritten note: “See, not so short.”

Spy’s main purpose was skewering New York’s elite, and while they had several favourite targets – Henry Kissinger, the editors of The New York Times – Trump was “No 1”. When they undertook a search for “America’s cheapest zillionaire”, sending cheques for tiny amounts to rich people to see who would bother cashing them in, Trump was the winner. “He redeemed a cheque for 13 cents.” The Spy-Trump relationship, such as it was, soured after an article debunking his claim that his first wife, Ivana, had been in the Czech Olympic ski team. Trump threatened to sue, and it soon became a habit – he would rip pages out of the magazine and send them to the publisher with messages handwritten in gold sharpie: “You’ll hear from my attorney.” Spy magazine eventually folded in 1998. “It was fun even when Spy was knocking the crap out of me,” Trump said in a 2006 interview. “But it’s more fun now that I’m on top and Spy is gone.”