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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Rory Carroll

Broken Archangel by Roland Philipps review – Roger Casement’s unquiet ghost

A statue of Roger Casement at Dún Laoghaire Baths near Dublin.
A statue of Roger Casement at Dún Laoghaire Baths near Dublin. Photograph: Mark Henderson/Alamy

The champion of Arabia never got to write the book, but gave Roland Phillips a title for his, a valuable but flawed study of a man whose actions and fate continue to ripple through British-Irish relations more than a century after his execution in 1916.

Casement gazes from a cover that splices two portraits into a discomfiting whole, preparing the reader for immersion in a life that crossed sexual, geographic and ideological boundaries, and a journey that made him a martyr for some, a traitor for others.

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