Adolf Verloc's seedy Soho shop is a front for political machinations, a meeting place for a moteley assortment of agitators and extremists. Verloc treads a dangerous line: consorting with anarchists, reporting their activities to a foreign embassy and passing on information to Scotland Yard. When Vladimir, his paymaster, orders Verloc to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as a wake-up call to complacent British authorities, the agent provocateur dupes a family member to act as unwitting bomb carrier. Executing the plan triggers a chain of events that topples Verloc from his position of comfortable duplicity. Conrad used a real-life attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory in 1894 as the springboard for this masterly tale of political intrique, espionage and terrorist intent, which crackles with prescient import.
Loading...
Details
ISBN:9781908533852
Physical Description:287 p.: ill.; 23 cm.
Publisher:Buckinghamshire, UK :Transatlantic Press ;2012.