St Patrick catching sight of Ireland for the first time as he is taken there as a prisoner...Joyce and Yeats eating sticky buns in a Dublin cafe...There has never before been an Irish history book remotely like this one, composed as a vast mosaic of incidents, encounters and vignettes. It is not so much a 'history of Irish civilization' as an 'Irish history of civilization'. In telling a wide range of stories about the Irish everywhere this historical-fictional account of the Irish peoples around the globe from the time of Christ to 1969 opens up the really big issues - the relationship between the minute particulars and the larger patterns which gradually become apparent. The stories themselves are by turns funny, acerbic, ironic, score-settling - never quite what they seem at face value. They are also deeply informed by the author's vast knowledge of Ireland, its history and its diaspora. For once the hyperbole is true - after this book, Irish history will never be the same again.