RORY CARROLL

It was a duel between two very different men – one trying to save an empire, the other trying to create a nation - waged in the shadows of the first world war. This deadly game of cat-and-mouse played out in London, Berlin, New York and Dublin with a supporting cast of codebreakers, swindlers, gunrunners and fanatics. The Easter 1916 Rising erupts in these pages but the narrative continues to spiral towards a devastating coda.

I combed diaries, letters, police reports, memoirs, court transcripts, secret service archives and declassified government files to create what I hope is a work of gripping nonfiction – a propulsive story that still echoes through Anglo-Irish relations and raises profound questions about honour, courage and the price of patriotism.

It would not have been possible without help from an outstanding researcher, Steve Ramsay, who peeled back layer after layer of the historical record to establish, as much as we could, what really happened.

In some ways A Rebel and a Traitor is a prequel to Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown. (The US version is titled There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes that Changed History). That tells the story of how the Irish Republican Army almost wiped out the entire British government with a time-bomb that detonated on October 12, 1984, the last day of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton. The most audacious conspiracy since the Gunpowder Plot came astonishingly close to killing the Iron Lady – and would not have happened without the events of 1916, that birthed the original IRA.

I'm also the author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, a chronicle of tragicomic, oil-fuelled revolution in South America that paved Venezuela’s current agony. It was named an Economist Book of the Year and BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. 

​I've been a foreign correspondent for the Guardian for two decades, covering Afghanistan, Africa, Iraq, the Balkans, Latin America and the US. I've also written for the Observer and The New York Times.  Since 2018 I've been based in my native Dublin as the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent.