Roger Casement: The Black Diaries - with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life

In this extended and further enhanced 3rd edition, with many more photographs, all Roger Casement’s Black Diaries are again published together, including, uniquely, a full version of the erotically-charged 1911 Diary over which London threatened an obscenity prosecution. The volume provides both a comprehensive text of the diaries, with explanations for their cast of characters, famous, infamous, and fleeting, and a context for the author whose significance and seminal role in the political development of independent Ireland has been masked by the debates over authenticity. This remains a uniquely original look at the Irish patriot and humanitarian, hanged in 1916 for treason. It was the same Casement whose reports in 1904 and 1912 on rubber slavery and genocide in King Leopold’s Congo and the Peruvian Amazon, reflected in his diaries, that shocked the world.The book also deals with the neglected sides of Casement’s life, his involvement in Ulster and Irish politics, his family background in Co. Antrim, his Belfast boyfriend Millar Gordon, and new discoveries about his sociopathic companion, the Norwegian sailor Adler Christensen. There is as well a comprehensive account of the authenticity controversies, Casement’s homosexuality, and his time in Africa and South America. Roger Casement had iconic status in life and, after death, was sanctified and vilified in equal measure. His real self was thus obscured. This book combines a rigorous academic study of the public and political Casement (with over 1,200 references and an extensive bibliography updated to 2018), alongside an account of his personal life, sexuality, and consular career, and an informed view of how they all interlocked and originated. It also provides an analysis of his early and key role in the Irish separatist movement, and a full exposition of the controversies that have swirled around him to this day, including attempts made in Dublin to threaten the truth about the Black Diaries."No Roger Casement – No Easter Rising": Casement commissioned the first arms for the IRA in 1914 and again in 1916 while from 1904 he tutored many of the key personnel who by 1921 had obtained a separate Irish state. To know about Roger Casement is to know why Ireland achieved independence and why Ulster stayed separate, remaining for the next century in the UK. This volume therefore provides an insight into the political conflict in the north and suggests how it could be diminished by both learning and respecting each other’s stories.