Cornelius Kilmainham is a historian and writer whose fascination with failed rebellions began in childhood, on family walks past the grey limestone of Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, where Ireland's own rebels awaited their verdicts. Raised on stories of risings that lost their battles and won their arguments, he has spent years tracing the same pattern across the nineteenth-century British Empire - the petitions, the scaffolds, and the quiet constitutional victories that followed. His research into the Canadian rebellions of 1837 drew him deep into trial transcripts, exile memoirs, and the carved keepsakes of transported prisoners. He writes from a book-crowded study in Dublin, within walking distance of the gaol that started it all.