To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best When François Mauriac was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952 many French writers were infuriated. Paul Clau-del dismissed his novels as slight and provincial. Simone de Beauvoir described him as senile. Graham Greene once said, famously: “I am a novelist who happens to be a Catholic.” Mauriac described himself as “a Catholic who writes novels”. The distinction is subtle but crucial. His novels – like those of two other modern Catholic novelists, Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge – might be short but they are perfectly formed. There was little that