In the 175 years since this paper was first published, Catholic writers have helped shape the literary canon. They include Cardinal Newman, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and a busy Birmingham parish priest The earliest years of The Tablet  coincided with the arrival of an ­intellectually distinguished cohort of converts from the Church of England to Catholicism. Many had been members of the Oxford Movement, and perhaps the greatest writer among them was John Henry Newman.Newman’s post-conversion texts are particularly dazzling. Indeed, in recent years, I have increasingly found myself urging Newman’s The Idea of a University (1852) upon colleagues, as an antidote to the instrumentalist view of higher education that dominates our ­current era of fees and funding. Ma