BRIEF HISTORY OF IRELAND: Land, People, History

From the dawn of history to the decline of the Celtic Tiger, this intriguing book shows how Ireland has been shaped by many things over the centuries - geography, war, the fight for liberty, and home to successive groups of settlers - Celts, Vikings, Normans, Anglo-Scots, Huguenots. 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 British Empire. Its fraught and sometimes brutal relationship with England has dominated its modern history. Killeen separates history from the myths. He argues that religion was decisive in all this - Ireland remained substantially Catholic, setting it at odds with the larger island 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, Becket and Heaney. Killeen locates Ireland in a European and Atlantic world and explores its literature, its diaspora, music and its genius for popular politics. 332 page paperback.