BROKEN ARCHANGEL, the tempestuous lives of Roger Casement

382pp., illus., paperback, London, 2024

British diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger Casement was born in Dublin in 1864. Orphaned at 13, he worked as a clerk at a Liverpool shipping company before sailing to Africa where he became a roving consul for the British Foreign Office. He was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru. After he retired from the Foreign Office in 1913 he became involved with Irish republicanism. After the outbreak of the First World war he travelled to Berlin to seek German aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to win Irish independence. On his return to Ireland he was arrested, convicted of high treason and hanged on 3 August 1916.

"Patriot, human rights campaigner, knight of the realm, traitor. Roger Casement was a complex, appealing, deeply flawed man. In Roland Philipps, he has found the biographer he deserves. This meticulous, sympathetic, elegantly-written account gives one of the 20th century's most controversial and tragic players the attention he deserves" Michela Wrong, author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz

"Roland Philipps’s comprehensive, perceptive and sympathetic biography does full justice to Casement’s odyssey from dysfunctional Ulster boyhood, through imperial service campaigning for exploited native workers, to his eventual execution as a nationalist revolutionary. It is a rich and compulsively readable treatment of the most extraordinary of Irish lives" Roy Foster, Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford

Roland Philipps is the author of the biographies A Spy Named Orphan, the enigma of Donald MacLean and Victoire, a wartime story of resistance, collaboration and betrayal.