When I was quite a new writer, my editor gave me a copy of The Beginning Of Spring. I sat in the Underground aglow with pleasure; the book felt like a talisman, writing to which I should aspire.

Sir Jimmy Savile "brought a little bit of magic and sparkle to everybody that he met", mourners at his funeral service were told today.

Demonstrators outside St Paul's Cathedral cautiously welcomed the leader of the opposition's support yesterday, but said the camp should stay independent of party politics.

The Church of England descended deeper into crisis tonight with the resignation of the most senior clergyman at St Paul’s Cathedral following weeks of internal rancour over the anti-corporate greed protests that have sprung up on the church’s doorstep.

By Paul Cahalan

Retired reverend interrupts morning service to blast authorities over Occupy London

They've pitched their tents outside the cathedral and now they are gearing up to take over the Square Mile

St Paul's Cathedral has been forced to close its doors to the public because of the anti-capitalist protest taking place outside.

St Paul's Cathedral could be forced to close its doors to members of the public as more people are joining anti-capitalist protests taking place in its churchyard.

The Chilean miners who spent 69 days trapped in a copper mine yesterday marked the one-year anniversary since their ordeal began.

Robert H Schuller, the preacher whose "Hour of Power" once attracted millions of TV viewers and turned him into one of America's first superstar televangelists, has been forced out of the church he founded, which has fallen deep into debt and is being torn apart by a simmering family dispute.

During the great religious battles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, music was one of the subtler, but most effective, weapons in the clergies' arsenal.

John Eliot Gardiner's prodigious output continues apace, with the recent Brahms 4th Symphony and an imminent further pair of his exhaustive pilgrimage series of Bach cantatas - surely the biggest current undertaking in any area of music - joined here by the reissue on his own label of another pilgrimage programme.

An odd and intermittently beautiful combination of finger-in-the-ear Norwegian folk songs about the Virgin Mary (sung by Langeland), with performances of Bach played by Lars Anders Tomter on a viola of 1590 and Kare Nordstoga on the baroque organ of Nidaros cathedral in Trondheim, where the recording was made.