THE SECRET AGENT : A SIMPLE TALE

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in Londons Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "e;a simple tale"e; proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and Londons fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.Based on the text which Conrads first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrads great London novel as the realization of a "e;monstrous town,"e; a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and savage butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrads narrative techniques.