Mr Verloc the secret agent keeps a shop in London's 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 "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians policemen foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town " a place of idiocy madness criminality and savage butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK imperialism and Conrad's narrative techniques.
