5 AUGUST 1978, Page 15

Saint Thomas More

Sir: If Auberon Waugh had bothered to find out what Cardinal Hume actually said he might have been struck, as I was, by an explicit reference to the fact that More actually gave his life for papal supremacy. He was not — as he tends to be portrayed in Bolt's play — a sort of existentialist hero 'creating himself' by a defence of his own integrity. But I suppose distinctions such as this are unlikely to be appreciated by nearparanoid polemical journalists.

Keith Mitchell 4 Cambridge Street, Tunbridge Wells, Kent