Career
He was born in Auckland, New Zealand. Eminent New Zealand author Sir James McNeish researched and wrote a biography of Paddy Costello entitled The Sixth Manitoba: the extraordinary life of Paddy Costello (Random House, 2007). In the preface to this book, Philip Knightley writes that "This long overdue biography sets the record straight.
lieutenant convincingly shows that the slim evidence for the traitor charge was invented, exaggerated and misinterpreted."
Paddy Costello also features in McNeish"s multiple biography Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in exile in the time of Hitler and Mao Tse Tung (Vintage, 2003) about five exceptional New Zealanders, four of them Rhodes scholars, who became caught up in the turmoil of their time.
Costello was the sixth manitoba