It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it plays into a founding psychodrama of the USA - the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Liverpudlian singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams has always had a literary bent. This doesn’t just manifest in overt ways, like writing a concept album about Sylvia Plath in 2015’s Hypoxia, but in perfectly potted narratives, microscopically brilliant turns of phrase, and even titles that make you double-take going all the way back to 1999’s “Dog Without Wings”. 

It is not just the season of holidays and holy days in the monotheistic religions; the art galleries and museums are busy reminding us of worlds beyond, with Imagining the Divine at the Ashmolean in Oxford, and Living with Gods at the British Museum (replete as is now de rigueur with illuminating radio programmes from Neil Macgregor, whose book will follow in March). God and gods are more than ever with us, even in the West’s secular age.

One of the summer’s greatest pleasures has been to confirm an often untested truism: that you may hear some of the finest and rarest music-making in out-of-the-way places. Just take a local who’s made the grade – in this instance, violinist and conductor Thomas Kemp – and who can gather friends and colleagues of equal calibre around him, harness the most atmospheric and/or unusual local venues, here spread around beautiful Kent country in the vicinity of heavily wooded North Downs and the Pilgrims’ Way, and you have a top-notch festival.

Attracting over one million visitors each year, Canterbury Cathedral is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. With its picturesque location and very nice, very white staff, the cathedral offers an easy metaphor for the version of England that Ukip supporters apparently hanker after, the narrator Saskia Reeves describing it as “England in stone”.

“I feel so alone I could cry”. As the keynote of Adam Smallbone’s Passion in the breathtaking third series of Rev, that unspoken sentiment provided a passacaglia bass line to the failure of St Saviour’s. Made explicit In the mouths of possibly 600 Londoners just around the corner from that noble edifice, in reality the relatively thriving St Leonard’s Shoreditch, it felt paradoxically uplifting and – I feel myself sucked in to use the word now that I'm signed up to Spitalfields hip – empowering.

Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend.

How do we know Jesus Christ was a Jew? He was still living with his mum at 33 and she thought he was God Almighty. Are you offended? I sincerely hope not and profuse apologies if you are, but that was the first religious joke I remember from my Catholic childhood, and which managed to take a swipe at two religions for the price of one.

This programme wants to challenge certain stereotypes around English identity. It wants to challenge the notion that to be English is to be “tolerant, white and Anglo-Saxon”. But before it does any of that, it wants to address just one question, and that is this: just why are the English so damned full of themselves? That’s right. Just where does their sense of superiority and entitlement come from? And what makes them think they can strut around the world with missionary zeal interfering in other people’s affairs all the time? OK, that’s several questions, but you see the theme.

Those of us who regarded The Office as a work of comic genius (not a word I use lightly) will, I'm afraid, take some convincing about Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais's latest offering. Keen fans who have followed the duo's every move since that landmark sitcom will feel they know every last trope on display in Life's Too Short, from its mockumentary setting and unPC subject matter to dark comedy and celebrity guest spots.