Jets often display bends and knots at which the flows change character. Extreme distortions have implications for the nature of jet flows and their interactions. We present the results of three radio mapping campaigns. The distortion of 3CRR radio galaxy NGC 7385 is caused by a collision with a foreground magnetised gas cloud which causes Faraday rotation and free-free absorption, and is triggered into star formation. For NGC 6109 the distortion is more extreme, creating a ring-shaped structure, but no deflector can be identified in cold or hot gas. Similar distortions in NGC 7016 are apparently associated with an X-ray gas cavity, and the adjacent NGC 7018 shows filaments drawn out beyond 100 kpc. Encounters with substructures in low-density, magnetised, intergalactic gas are likely causes of many of these features.

Radio galaxies of intermediate power dominate the radio-power injection in the Universe as a whole, due to the break in the radio luminosity function, and so are of special interest. The population spans FR I, FR II, and hybrid morphologies, resides in a full range of environmental richness, and sources of all ages are amenable to study. We describe structures and interactions, with emphasis on sources with deep high-resolution Chandra X-ray data. As compared with low-power sources there is evidence that the physics changes, and the work done in driving shocks can exceed that in evacuating cavities. A range of morphologies and phenomena is identified.

We report the discovery of the first ‘X’-shaped double-double radio galaxy (DDRG), MRC0929+164 (J0932+1611), from FIRST radio survey. The intersection angle of the lines of two pairs of radio lobes is around 20.6° for this object, much larger than other DDRGs. This unusual morphology may be a hint that the growth of its central super-massive black hole suffered a violent galaxy merger once.

We present preliminary results on a spectal analysis of quasars observed by the X-ray observatory Ginga. Simple power-law models with fixed Galactic absorbtion provide an adequate description of the spectra for most of the sources in the 2–18 keV band. A small number of sources show evidence for a feature at 6.4 keV (in the source rest frame) due to Fe line emission. Maximum likelihood and Spearman rank tests were used to investigate the relationship between radio loudness and X-ray spectral index in this class of object. These tests showed, respectively, that the mean X-ray spectral index of radio quiet quasars (RQQs) is significantly different from that of flat spectrum radio loud quasars (FRSQs) at the >99% level, and that the dominant relationship with spectral index is radio loudness (not X-ray luminosity or redshift) at >99% significance. This last result has not previously been demonstrated in this band, but agrees with findings in the lower energy Einstein band (0.5–3.5 keV). These results are discussed in the context of current unified models.