Surprises from the archive: when Evelyn Waugh savaged a reviewer for Dorothy L Sayers comparison

This is part of a series of blogs celebrating The Tablet’s new online archive, where for a limited time you can view for free every page of every issue since 1840. Reviewing for The Tablet can be a dangerous business. The danger rises exponentially if you happen to be reviewing in the 1950s and fall foul of the famously caustic contributor, Evelyn Waugh. Fr Gerard Meath OP could not have known that, in making a brief comparison between respective fictional accounts of St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, produced by Waugh and by Dorothy Sayers, he would end up defending himself from the great and the good of the Catholic world – a foray that the newly digitised archive of The Tablet now lets us follow in full.  The offence arose when, with Waugh’s Helena i