Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement

In 1937 W.B. Yeats wrote that: ‘The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door.’ Just under eight decades later, as the country marked the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, it seemed as though Ireland had finally welcomed Casement’s ghost inside and invited him to get comfortable. A year on from a referendum that saw Irish voters approve marriage equality by a landslide, and with a peace agreement in Northern Ireland still holding, the Irish public appeared ready to claim – and acclaim – Roger Casement and all his complexities and contradictions.

That summer I attended a panel discussion about Casement at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Most of the audience’s questions suggested national pride in Casement as a suitable show more hero for a country buoyed by its newfound status as a progressive nation. But one audience member was at odds with the wider consensus: he accused the panel of slandering the dead patriot by accepting the authenticity of diaries in which Casement recorded his homosexual encounters. The ghost of Roger Casement, it seemed, was receiving questions from the floor.

A century on from his execution, Casement’s contradictions still incite passionate responses – and not only in the atypically febrile atmosphere of Irish history Q&A sessions. Casement, as Roland Philipps underlines in his new biography of the humanitarian and Irish rebel, was a modern figure. Broken Archangel is a biography that sets out to provide a portrait of Casement’s career in its entirety. It is a book that will particularly suit readers who may have only encountered Casement briefly in the footnotes of someone else’s story.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Maurice J. Casey is a Research Fellow in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals is forthcoming with Footnote Press. show less