Books: No Raspberry

HELENA (247 pp.)—Evelyn Waugh—Little, Brown ($2.75).

Britain's old King Coel, a Roman puppet of the 3rd Century, may have been a merry old soul, but his daughter Helena was a sober young gentlewoman. She made a proper marriage to the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus, and bore him a son who became Constantine the Great. After Constantine had accepted Christianity, the Empress Dowager Helena—by that time a doughty dame of 80 or so—undertook the arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. While there, she discovered in an abandoned cistern two baulks of timber which a great part of the Christian world has ever since accepted as...

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