Irish poets wrote as much about love and beauty, memory, God and grief as their French, or English, or Dutch counterparts, but viewed in the round Irish literature, in Irish and English, is indelibly stamped by the cultural and political experience of colonisation. From the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bards’ and chroniclers’ literary record of a distressed Gaelic civilisation and of the depredations of foreign heretics, to the nineteenth-century novelists wrestling with the concept of ‘national character’ as destiny in the age of union, Ireland’s British Question could not, it seems, be avoided.