The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

Edited and with Notes by Peter Lancelot Mallios
Introduction by Robert D. Kaplan
In reexamining "The Secret Agent in a post-9/11 world, Robert D. Kaplan praises Joseph Conrad's "surgical insight into the mechanics of terrorism," calling the book "a fine example of how a savvy novelist may detect the future long before a social scientist does."
This intense 1907 thriller-a precursor to works by Graham Greene and John le Carre-concerns a British double agent who infiltrates a cabal of anarchists. Conrad explores political and criminal intrigue in a modern society, building to a climax that the critic F. R. Leavis deemed "one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction."

With an Introduction by Graham Stewart, author of the internationally acclaimed Burying Caesar and The History of The Times, The Murdoch Years. Joseph Conrad was a remarkable and unique phenomenon in British literature. Born in Poland in 1857, he worked as a merchant seaman before turning his hand to writing novels in English. Heart of Darkness, filmed by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now , Nostromo (adopted as the name of the spacecraft in the film Alien), Lord Jim and above all The Secret Agent, converted to a film by Alfred Hitchcock, penetrate to the heart of evil and the evil in the human heart. The Secret Agent (1907) is a shattering exposi of the callous cast of mind behind the wave of terrorist attacks which swept Europe and America between 1892 and 1901. Its lessons are of extraordinary relevance to the al Qaeda outrages which began with 9/11 in New York and continue now in Madrid and London. As Graham Stewart, The Times historian, who provides a new introduction to this volume, points out - The Secret Agent had its germ in an actual attempt made in 1894 to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.