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Ireland has been home to successive groups of settlers and waves of immigration - Celts, Vikings, Normans, Elizabethan-English adventurers, Anglo-Scots settlers, Cromwellians, Huguenots, Palatines and others. It has imported huge ideas, none bigger than Christianity which it then re-exported to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. In the Tudor era it became the first colony of the developing English Empire. Its fraught and sometimes brutal relationship with England has dominated its modern history. This tangled relationship between Ireland and the English Crown is a key part of the story as are nationalism, religious allegiances and Ireland's internal conflicts. Killeen argues that religion was decisive in all this - Ireland remained substantially Catholic, setting it at odds with the larger Ireland culturally, religiously and politically. But its own culture and identity have stayed strong, most obviously in literature with a magnificent tradition of writing from the Book of Kells to the modern masters Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and Heaney. Killeen locates Ireland in a European and Atlantic world and explores the nation's remarkable contribution throughout the world through its literature, diaspora, music and its genius for popular politics. 332pp, paperback.