These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves. Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language.

Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind. These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology's boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles—which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland—and wrote in a familiar form of English.