Roger Casement had a life that defies categorisation: an imperial administrator who exposed imperial atrocities; a one-time diplomat for the United Kingdom who enlisted German help in Ireland’s fight for freedom; a closeted gay man who left detailed records of his sexual adventures; a knight of the realm convicted of conspiring against the crown.

TE Lawrence (“of Arabia”), himself no stranger to the hypocrisy of British imperialism and the difficulties of illegal sexuality, called Casement a “broken archangel”. Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent, retains some of that poetry in this deeply researched and fascinating account of Casement’s role in the creation of the Irish state.

The bulk of the action in A Rebel and a Traitor takes place between 1914 and 1916. At the start of this period, Casement – still respected in London as a recently retired consul in Britain’s diplomatic service – gives evidence to a royal commission in 1914 on the regulation of service overseas. By the end, he is awaiting execution for treason at Pentonville prison.

In between, the ex-diplomat travelled to the US to rally support for the Irish cause; to Germany, to raise an army to fight the British; to Ireland on the eve of the Easter Rising; and then back to London, this time as a captive.

Casement was bequeathed, in Carroll’s words, a “fractured identity” as the child of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother who were both dead by the time he was 12. He was courteous and tireless and, in the words of the man who killed him, “the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute”.

A depressive nomad who felt lonely even among friends, he joined the colonial service in the late 19th century and served in Africa, where he became so appalled by the plight of rubber workers in the Belgian Congo that he worked tirelessly to expose their exploitation. His experiences there, as well as in South Africa during the Boer war, were to turn him decisively against colonialism, and he left government in 1913.

Casement’s nemesis was Reginald “Blinker” Hall, an arrogant and obsessive naval captain with a facial tic who headed up the British admiralty’s intelligence service and, through his access to decrypted telegrams between Germany and the US, tracked the Irishman’s attempts to enlist Berlin to the cause of Irish independence. Alongside the two of them is a cast of nationalists, socialists, imperialists, viceroys, rural police officers, bewildered agricultural labourers and more.

Carroll’s achievement is to situate this by turns tragic, farcical and heroic duel within the broader context of the first world war without ever allowing it to be overshadowed by the slaughter elsewhere. The U-boat commander who delivered Casement to Ireland had, just a few months earlier, sunk the Lusitania and thus killed more than 1,000 people – but the focus remains on the smaller battle within the global conflict.

In normal times, Casement might have ended up making speeches on Hyde Park Corner or writing articles for niche publications. In the heightened circumstances of world war, however, when young men were marched to their deaths by the thousand and governments took risks they would never normally contemplate, he won an audience among Britain’s adversaries, and the chance to change the destiny of his nation.

Casement was recaptured shortly after his return to Ireland, so his attempt to lead his nation to freedom was – in crude terms – a failure. However, along with the similarly abortive Rising in Dublin, it helped create the mood of defiance that led to open war and the once impossible-seeming dream of an Irish state becoming reality.

At the end of the book, I did find myself wishing it went on to analyse the reasons for the eventual defeat of British rule in the years following Casement’s execution, and to describe more fully the more consequential Irish leaders of the time. However, that is not what Carroll is here to do, and he succeeds in his core task of humanising a complex man, giving him credit for his strengths while never hiding his flaws, not least his penchant for young and vulnerable sexual partners.

There have been attempts to film Casement’s life in the past – a 1934 Hollywood screenplay even imagined a tearful parting from a blond girlfriend – and I would not be surprised if a producer reads this book and decides to have another go. There would surely be a lot of competition for the chance to play the role of this strange, fascinating, improbable man.

Mary Earps is “drawn to people with a rebellious nature, people who aren’t afraid to say what they really think”.

So it was “pretty cool”, the footballer says, when she was chosen to be one of the “rebels” included in the new edition of the global bestseller Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.

Originally published in 2016 as a collection of “100 tales of extraordinary women”, the children’s book was a huge hit, and has since been translated into more than 50 languages and sold in more than 110 countries. The Rebel Girls team has since published numerous follow-up titles, including 100 Immigrant Women Who Changed the World and Rebel Girls Celebrate Pride.

While spin-off Rebel Girls titles – such as the Growing Up Powerful series aimed at the first book’s original, now teenage, fans – continue to be published, author Elena Favilli felt that the original book was due an update this year. The US-based Italian writer, who wrote the original Rebel Girls title with her then-civil partner Francesca Cavallo, has written 22 additional stories for the new edition, featuring Earps, Indigenous rights advocate Autumn Peltier, film-maker Greta Gerwig, actor Michelle Yeoh, climate activist Greta Thunberg and more.

With the new stories, Favilli wanted “to really try to focus on the women who have created cool inventions or trailblazed in different fields over the past 10 years”.

But how to pick just 22? Whittling down the contenders has “always been the sad part of the process”, Favilli says. But her criteria has remained the same since 2016: “To create a mix of famous and less famous people, and really try to cover all the different geographies in the world and not just focus on western countries.”

She also takes care to choose stories “that could expose girls to all the different challenges of life, not just the most successful aspects”.

Of course, the book celebrates women’s “extraordinary accomplishments”, but at the same time Favilli tries to “never shy away from also telling the hard or the sad parts”. She says it was important in the first edition to include Nina Simone, for example, who was in some ways “very flawed”.

“That’s one aspect of sexism, that women should be celebrated only if they are perfect,” Favilli says – instead, she is keen to celebrate the “very human stories” of women.

While researching the book, Favilli learned about some “incredible” women, such as Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian-American biochemist whose work led to the discovery of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. “It’s an incredible story of the resilience and talent of a woman who was dismissed for a long time as a researcher but who just kept following her instinct and her passion,” Favilli says. “She made an immense contribution to science and society in a moment that was so desperate and tragic for the entire world.”

Nottingham-born Earps, who won the Golden Glove award at the 2023 Women’s World Cup for best goalkeeper of the tournament, has become an inspiration for young players, as more girls than ever have started playing football in recent years in the UK.

As a child it would have been “fantastic to see” role models in a book such as Rebel Girls, Earps says. “When you’re younger, you’re told not to be a rebel. You’re told not to disrupt the status quo and just kind of keep quiet and go along with it.”

But it’s important to be a rebel sometimes, Earps says: “It’s about having the courage to speak your truth and say your opinion, and maybe challenging things which, in all fairness, should be challenged.”

Irish disability activist Sinéad Burke, who is also featured in Favilli’s new edition, is grateful that her nephews and nieces will now have this book. It’s so important children are “exposed to stories that represent their lived experiences and help them to not feel alone”, she says.

“When I was a child, there was very little representation of disabled protagonists in stories, particularly written by disabled authors,” she adds. “The representation of a little person living a fulfilled, complete life, not framed by charity or tragedy, while not erasing the difficulties, would have given me a new axis to work from.”

Nine years on from the original Rebel Girls book’s publication, feminism is in some ways under more threat than ever, with the rise of misogynistic influencers online and in boardrooms and governments.

“The fight for women’s rights is as urgent today as it was 10 years ago,” Favilli says, noting: “Every new push forward when it comes to civil rights or human rights has always, throughout history, been opposed by backward forces.”

She thinks we’re living in a period of such pushback, remembering that when she started working on the original book 10 years ago, there was a sense of “excitement” and “hope”.

When the book came out: “I thought that my work was really aligned with the zeitgeist. It almost felt as if we were all finally fighting the good fight together … like a wave that kept building and building. And now, unfortunately, it’s not.”

She hopes the new edition can be a “sort of beacon of hope for younger generations”.

“As long as we keep nurturing our younger generations with stories that show them that these things are possible and that they are achievable to them, I think we make sure that children have the most important vaccine against sexism,” she says. “If anything, this book is probably even more important now than it was when it first came out.”