Van Morisson’s incantations and repetitions, admonitions, yearnings and folk-music prove that people walked this earth yearning for a heaven elsewhere. Thomas McCarthy on a selection of Morisson’s lyrics.

Are we going to die, Granddad? It hardly bears imagining what torture must have gone through the mind of Nick Morris in the brief instant between life and death after a missile tore through Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine.