The Secret Agent

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From the seed of an actual attempt, made in 1894, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, Conrad created one of his most tense and chilling plots. The world of The Secret Agent - the world of law and order, fatuous civil servants and corrupt policemen - is grotesquely mirrored in its underworld, a squalid terrorist landscape inhabited by, among others, the Professor, who always carries a bomb in his pocket, and Verloc the pornographer, deceiver and spy. Repulsive characters and amoral caricatures collaborate to form a black satire on English society, a satire sharpened into focus with a portrait of "family life": Winnie Verloc's story relentlessly told to its anarchic end of utter desolation, madness and despair . The bones of this tale, Conrad agreed, make up a grisly skeleton , yet The Secret Agent is certainly his most humorous and probably his most popular book, and,according to F.R. Leavis, one of the unquestionable classics of the first order that he added to the English novel . The cover shows a details from Hampstead Hill by John Atkinson Grimshaw