'Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world'
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent
communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack
on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the
police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to
discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly
awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions.
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