A British newspaper has claimed three of Ireland’s most celebrated and distinguished authors for the British.

The Telegraph selected the "20 best British novels of all time," but it appears the newspaper needs a geography lesson. The authors that The Telegraph claimed were British included Irish authors James Joyce, John Banville and Flann O’Brien.

The list cites Flann O'Brien's work as “a book within a book within a book, a satirical evocation of 1930s Ireland, in which the characters write about one another, and these various fictional figments gang up on the notional author.”
 
Someone clearly needed to take a look at an Atlas before publishing the article. Ulysses is described as: "A day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, as they criss-cross Dublin on June 4, 1904. Every word is pregnant with meaning, every character’s thought conjured with precision, yet it is brilliantly, consistently, laugh-outloud funny."

It’s rather ironic that this list appears less than a week after the historic first state visit of Irish President Michael D Higgins to Britain.