The French highwire artist Philippe Petit walks a tightrope in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, last week, to mark the 50th anniversary of his 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers, destroyed in 2001, of the World Trade Center. Mr Petit, who is now 75, has longstanding connections to the cathedral. In 1980, he was arrested after wire-walking across the nave, 20 feet above the ground. As police took him away in handcuffs, the late Dean, the Very Revd James Parks Morton, requested his release, and, shortly after, named him artist-in-residence (a title that he holds today). When Mr Petit’s 13-year-old daughter died of a brain haemorrhage in 1992, Dean Morton conducted her funeral, and her ashes lie in the cathedral’s columbarium. Speaking to the Associated Press in 1997, Mr Petit said: “A steel cable with a human being on it does not belong in a church. But this is not a daredevil act. It is an act of poetry and art that reflects what a living cathedral should be”

AP Photo/Alan Welner, FileAP Photo/Alan Welner, File