Thanks, I tried drawing the graph on a piece of paper, and while I'm not yet sure I think it may be possible to say that: the graph for any undecomposable submatrix has a cycle that traverses all its nodes; and that: the nodes in the longest cycle form the largest undecomposable submatrix. Thus from the example in the OP, you can get cycles A-2-E-4-A and B-3-C-1-D-5-B, but there is no cycle looping through all 10 of the nodes.

That does not immediately help, since Graph will only find "the first cycle" - I can't tell from the docs (nor from a brief look at the code), but I suspect that since all my edges are undirected, it will just immediately return (eg) A-2-A as a cycle - but this concept may well help me search for an algorithm.

Update: this page tells me:

Finding the longest cycle in a graph includes the special case of Hamiltonian cycle (see gif), so it is NP-complete.

Hugo