The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

In a small shop in Soho that sells cheap stationery and dubious photographs, Mr Verloc lives with his wife Winnie, her ageing mother and her brother Stevie, a gentle young man with a mental disability. Verloc is secretly paid by a foreign embassy to spy on London's anarchists, and when his new employer demands an outrage that will shock the British public, a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory, Verloc draws Stevie into the plot, with terrible consequences for everyone in the house.

Joseph Conrad based the story on a real incident of 1894, when an anarchist was killed by his own bomb in Greenwich Park. Published in 1907, the novel is darkly ironic and strikingly modern in its picture of terrorism, police and politics, and it inspired Alfred Hitchcock's film Sabotage (1936). Read it with Heart of Darkness, and see Conrad's life.

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born Józef Korzeniowski to Polish parents in today's Ukraine. His father was exiled for patriotic activities, and Conrad was orphaned at eleven. At sixteen he went to sea from Marseille, and he spent twenty years as a sailor, rising to captain in the British merchant navy.

A voyage up the Congo in 1890 marked him for life and led to Heart of Darkness. He began writing in English, his third language, and became one of its great novelists with Lord Jim and Nostromo. His books ask what people do when no one is watching.