Roger Casement is a man whose reputation was destroyed by wartime expedience and propaganda. Glossed over in Irish history because of supposed homosexuality. I don't care, and the murk of propaganda has obscured any truth that may be, the facts are that he didn't marry, that he had both female and male friends and that he often stayed with male friends.

Casement gave his health in the service of the crown, he investigated atrocities in both Congo and Brazil. He started asking inconvenient questions about colonialism and when he did this he also had to ask inconvenient questions about Ireland and it's experience and this led to his sympathies with Irish Nationalists.

This doesn't go into much about Casement as a person, though I suspect he was quite driven and probably got very mono-focused when he had something to research. He made friends and then drove them away and was probably quite a complicated man to deal with. Still he has influence and his legacy of talking about fair trade exists to this day.

Born in what is now the North and buried now in Arbour Hill, a place he didn't want to be buried, but the legacy of partition would make that more messy than it's worth. He was a civil servant who went to far-off lands, wrote about what he saw but often couldn't just leave it in the hands of those above him, and in fact, publicly denounced things, like the mess that King Leopold had made in the Congo, shining a spotlight on it and refusing to remove it.

His trial was a mess, his legal council let him down and the country that held his actions treasonous actually treated him so badly it wasn't funny.

A complex man and this is probably not the last biography to be written about him. ( )