The physical entity of the Vatican sometimes reminds me of Gormenghast, the rambling castle gripped by iron traditions, imagined by that flawed genius Mervyn Peake. Things happen there because they have happened like that before. Two despatches from The Vatican brought details from the now changing scene.

One was by Tom Kington, for The Times, who gave news of the man who “now lives a quiet life of prayer in a cottage in the Vatican gardens”. The cottage is the 4,000-square-foot Mater Ecclesiae monastery with its own chapel, where the former Pope Benedict XVI is looked after by some nuns. A detail of Benedict’s life before he became pope came this week from a book-length interview by Peter Seewald, or rather from something that the author had told Die Welt for the occasion of its publication and The Times was now passing on.

In his student days, Joseph Ratzinger “was really a very smart-looking guy, a handsome young man, an aesthete who wrote poetry and read Hermann Hesse. A fellow student told me he had quite an effect on women, and vice versa. The decision to choose celibacy wasn’t easy for him.