The English have a phrase 'past history', meaning something that's settled, or that we're prepared to forget. A whole world of security lies behind that little phrase. A nation with a different history couldn't have invented it. In the face of oppression, a consciousness forms in which there is only present history. Where identity is threatened, its continuity becomes crucial. This comes over very clearly in Eilis Dillon's Irish novel Across the Bitter Sea….

The early chapters of the novel have an authentic documentary power, but as the network of relationships spreads through the second and third generations, the whole structure begins irresistibly, and incongruously, to suggest a Fenian Forsyte Saga. The Easter Rising becomes rather like a Sports Gala, with Morgan's grand-nieces running messages round every corner, and his grandson doing well in the Sniping Event. When a national legend begins to put on weight in this way, it is perhaps a sign that it is finally slipping into past history.

[In Living in Imperial Rome Eilís Dillon] describes in detail, and in turn, the life of a Roman senator, business man, farmer, and stallholder, all living in Rome in A.D. 110, at the time of the Emperor Trajan. Each one's life and the circumstances surrounding it are interlinked with the others so that the whole book presents a vivid and lively panorama of life in Rome at that time…. [In] discussing the life and work of each of these four central people the author is able to convey a sound and fascinating knowledge of the religion, politics, law, medicine, philosophy and military procedure of that period. It is an erudite book, but probably because the author usually writes novels, the presentation in a series of four family stories is endowed with very real characters who bring history into close proximity in an entertaining as well as an enlightening manner. As each of the four pictures are linked there tends at times to be a little confusion, but on the whole the interlacing of the four families and their views regarding each other is cleverly and harmoniously done. The author gives evidence of research and scholarship which is illuminated by her knowledge of human nature, and her interest in present-day Rome which obviously and rightly she feels is still strongly coloured by its history. The author should be commended for producing a book of individual and distinctive character which will provide for more than merely background material to the study of the history of that time and place. (pp. 116-17)