Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement
(By Roland Philipps)
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| Author | Roland Philipps |
In 1904 Roger Casement became an overnight celebrity when he broadcast the abuses of the Belgian Congo and lobbied for change. Widely admired and even knighted for his humanitarian fervour, still he did not reveal all of himself. The internal fault lines ran deep: he was neither fully Irish nor English; baptised Catholic but raised Protestant; party to colonial rule yet appalled by its cruelties; and desperate for intimacy while tormented by his homosexuality.
Plagued by poor mental health, these competing stresses would eventually overwhelm Casement - and he enters Germany during the First World War with a rash scheme to incite the Easter Rising. Later captured and declared a traitor by the British, his reputation in ruins after details of his sex life are leaked, Casement's life ends on the gallows and his body in an unmarked grave until, decades later, he is honoured with an Irish state funeral.
Activist, patriot, lover, traitor, martyr: Roger Casement has been many things, to many people. Throughout all these myriad lives, Casement remained someone who struggled with his identity in a world that wilfully condemned difference. Broken Archangel brings the real - passionate, self-deceiving, altruistic, insecure, determined - Roger Casement to life for the first time.”
